Oh, fuckmonkeys...

What the devil is wrong with my blog? There's this massive mofoing gap between the title of the post and the main post itself. Shit, shittum, shitwank.

I hate this gap. Ever since the gap has appeared, I've had NO comments on any of my posts. No feedback. No visits. This gap is a SHIT. It's a leech. It's attached itself to the life-artery of my blog (its aorta, if you will) and has proceeded to suck happily at the sweet plasmatic fluids. This gap MOCKS ME. I sit here and stare at it angrily, wondering what this gap has planned next for me. I consider blogging, writing something, but, somehow, the words don't come. And it's the fault of those many lines of blank white space. I just get the feeling that, whatever happens, this fucking gap is going to seperate my no doubt HILARIOUS and WITTY post title from the rest of my HILARIOUS and WITTY post. I can't blog properly about anything. Except, it seems, this gap.

But I can't just sit here and write an essay everyday about how much I hate that fucking gap.
Can I?
I mean, I could, but I guess it would get boring. Quite quickly.

So far, I've come up with THREE possible reasons for the current gappyness in the blog:

1: Some Sort of Curse. I don't know, I've spent a lot of time digging in that indian burial ground and opening up ancient egyptian tombs recently. It's not my fault that I discovered an indian burial ground inside an ancient egyptian tomb the other day, and decided to jump around on it, peeing everywhere. And it's certainly not my fault that, in order to get into the tomb, I had to break seven mirrors, drive over a black cat, walk under Every Ladder Ever Made, throw salt at The Most Unlucky Man Ever, and do lots of stuff thats related to 13. Sleep with a 13 year old. A 13 year old whose mother was a witch. Oh, who am I kidding? I'm never going to sleep with anyway. Perhaps that's part of the curse too.
Damn curses. Well, I guess that I can count myself lucky that the worst curse somebody could think to put on me was to have a large gap between the title and the post body. At least I don't look like Bob Geldof.

2: The Template. This is all I can think of... the Holy Template. The template is something I fear, something that I dare only meddle with after having a stiff drink and carefully studying a dictionary of html for a period of no longer than 4 hours. Why do I fear the template? Because the template can turn my blog from a vision of beauty to a hellish pit of HTML DEATH in a matter of seconds. And this is why I fear it. Perhaps I have somehow angered The Template, and this gap is my just punishment.

O Temple, I beg forgiveness. Now remove that gap, you fucking bitch. Or I'll be forced to go in there myself and SORT YOU OUT. For I am one mean son of a bean. And I'm scared of going into the template. You never know what you'll find when you emerge, covered in those little triangles that plague the HTMLing world so. Probably a load of crazy lines and an even bigger gap.

And that's a risk that I'm not willing to take.

3: My computer is just being a bitch. I have a Mac. The internet hates Macs. This is because TEH INTERNET IS TEH SUX0R.


My computer. As you can see, cutting edge... you can see why Microsoft may wish to trip up my progress in the internet by adding random gaps into my computing algorithms. Fucking algorithms. Dijkstra my ass.

If anybody has any idea how to remove that DAMN GAP, please tell me, and I'll marry you. Do it please, for the goodness of the blog. Because this gap is seriously pissing me off. And when I get pissed off... people die. I also turn green and gain some magic stretching purple shorts.

Damn gaps...

The Start of Resident Evil 4

Yes, that's right, this game is SO manly, I'm going to give you a runthrough of what happened the first few times I played it. Because, I'm cool:

Well, you start in this car with these two Spanish guys called Santos and Pasqual. Well, we're never told that they're specifically NAMED Santos and Pasqual, but... come on. A pair of Spanish guys in nice uniforms? They're called Santos and Pasqual. And straight away, we know that these two are going to GET IT, because:

a: It's an American game (you can tell this, because they refer to Europe as a country... "I'm in this forest in the middle of Europe"... "she was spotted in Europe"), and thus any non-fit-female foreigners are going to be either comic relief or enemy fodder, and neither Santos NOR Pasqual are funny.
b: They are mean to our Hero, Manly Leon.
c: They refuse to get out of the car. Staying in the car is the number one cause of death in horror related films. Apparently it's always safer to get out and wander through the woods blindly, hoping that something exciting will happen.
d: They're wearing a uniform. Wearing a uniform is murder in the video-game universe. If a character's wearing a uniform, it means that the game designer hadn't been that bothered with the coding of them, as he knew that the character wasn't gonna be in the game for very long. If Santos and Pasqual had been wearing full size rainbow coloured diving suits with different indian headresses and had their own theme music, then I might have been more disposed to thinking that they survive. But a dull blue uniform? Sorry lads, no chance.

So, after crossing a bridge, you are dumped in the middle of the woods. Our Hero, Manly Leon, who despite having a gay emo haircut has a gun and a natty jacket, pulls out his gun and sets off on his mission. I immediately tried to have him run away towards civilisation, but apparently the game rules don't allow The Sensible Option. Leon also has a radio which allows him to talk nice lady who calls him up every twenty minutes, just to make sure he's ok. Yeah, nice one ma'am, keep radioing him. Don't, you know, send backup or anything. Just leave him in the middle of the enemy infested woods.


Artist's impression of Leon. Notice his thoughtful expression as he takes aim at the horde of brilliantly drawn zombies JUST out of shot. Also notice his rather fag-tastic hairdo. NB: Leon's skin is not pink. Yet. But you never know what could happen.

So, after wandering in circles for a bit while I figured out how to make Leon move in a straight line, we wandered down a path. Joe at this point was getting very overexcited, screaming RUN RUN RUN DOWN THE PATH YOU FOOL! at me, so I went out of my way to open the map every three paces and repeatedly change direction.

Eventually you end up in this house, where there's this angry mofo with an axe and a natty beard who decides that he's had enough of your pesky nosiness, and decides to chop you up good with his axe. Fortunately, this villager walks at, like two miles per hour and you're armed with a gun. I still managed to miss him with five of my shots, then wasted a good portion of the remained shooting him in the torso, which is apparently not full of vital organs in the Resident Evil world. BUT AFTER YOU KILL HIM, his buddies comes along. By the way, these guys AREN'T ZOMBIES. They are real, living humans. Fortunately, they speak a foreign language so you're allowed to kill them. Despite that his buddies also walk at, like two miles per hour and have little/no reasoning ability, I ran upstairs and threw myself out of a window, before missing both of them with well-aimed bullets. However, I then discovered the amazing 'kick' button, which allows you to do kung fu on the poor villagers. So, once they were dead, it was on with my investigation.

I sort of wandered down the road, walking into every booby trap on my way, wondering why, if the villagers were sophisticated enough to build lazer-powered boobie traps, they weren't smart enough to figure out guns. Or co-ordinating their attacks. Or, you know, running. EVENTUALLY, I reached the village, and discovered what those nasty, nasty villagers had done with Santos and Pasqual. Well, Santos anyway... Pasqual later turned up floating in a lake, before being eaten by a giant fish. Yes, you heard me, a giant fish. THEY HAD BURNT SANTOS ALIVE. ARGH. Well, possibly not alive.

That wasn't very nice. So then I decided that the straight attack on the village was what was necessay, so I ran in and shot lots of villagers. Then I went and hid inside a house and found A SHOTGUN. Then this guy with a bag on his head and a chainsaw came and cut off my head. Literally, the first time I heard the ROAR of the chainsaw I cried "WHOOPEE!". And my exact feelings when that guy first chainsawed off my head... wow. I was LITERALLY breathless. If you've seen Evil Dead 2, remember the first time Ash kitted up and said 'Groovy'. THAT was the level of amazed breathlessness that we're talking here. We're talking HEART IN MOUTH OPEN MOUTHED SHOCK.

"He... cut... off... my... HEAD!"

Lolz pwned!!!! LOLZ!!!!11!!!!ONE!!!!


Artist's Impression of Chainsaw Man. As you can see, very scary.

So, after that POOR excuse for a life, Ogg had a go. Chainsawed. Joe had a go. Chainsawed. We were having a difficult time cracking this, despite our very different tactics for surviving Village Run 1, as I've taken to calling it in the past half second.

My first tactic: Sneak around really sneakily, then lose it and run into a tiny room full of angry villagers and a chainsaw wielding freak. Get chainsawed.
Ogg's tactic: Run around really quickly, trying to do everything really cleverly. Climb up the tower. Climb down the tower. Get chainsawed.
Joe's tactic: Run around, trying to open every door in the village in a vain hope that one of them will lead somewhere useful. Fail. Get trapped in a corner. Chainsawed.
My second tactic: Give up trying to get anywhere, run amok in circles shooting anything that comes near... SURVIVE. For a bit. Then get blown up/eaten by something nasty. Or chainsawed. Yes, there is more chainsawing.

Did I mention that there was a guy with a chainsaw? And he survives EVERYTHING. I shot him with a shotgun, like, twelve times. All he does is fall down for a bit. He's even more invincible to gunfire than Lisa was in Resident Evil: Biohazard (man, that was a SCARY ass game).

But I must say, having survived the SCARY GIANT FISH (killed by throwing sticks into its mouth)


Random picture I found on google by typing in 'big fish'. NB: In the game, the fish is bigger. And probably less dangerous, seeing as all it does is swim in a circle and lose a swimming race with a fully dressed man wearing his shoes.

... the SCARY GIANT MAN (killed with the help of a cute passing dog)


Artist's (by the way, when I say 'artist', I really mean me, in ten seconds, with one hand) impression of giant. Pay attention to the mean expression on his face, and the relative sizes between the giant/a man. NB: Giant is neither green nor jolly.

... and THE SCARY MEN WHOSE HEADS EXPLODE TO REVEAL A HUGE BLOODY MASS OF EVIL WORMS (killed by running away. Fast.).


I quite like how I have delicately detailed the thought process that this fella is going through.

I thought that I'd seen it all. BUT I WASN'T PREPARED TO MEET MR CHAINSAW'S WIVES. BOTH OF THEM.

AT ONCE.

IN A PIT.

Chainsawlarity ensued.

Damn, that's one fuckoff good game. At the madcap rate I'm playing it, I think I'll have finished it by, uh, next week? Then I'll need a new ultraviolent game to play.

God Bless You, China!

Hello. Does anyone know why the top post is all fucked up? No? Oh well.

First things first: EXAMS ARE OVER! WAHOOO! YAY! WHOOPEE! WICKED! HUZZAH! DANCE PARTY TIME! YAY! LOLZ! etc.
I mean, now the exams are over, I can finally have some fun without the endless rigours of revision and parental pressure about revision, and, my god, the terrible EXAMS and the cold sweats at night and the...

Ok, I lie. At MOST, the GCSEs were a minor inconvenience to me. No, not even that. GCSEs made my life EVEN EASIER than they had been already. Study leave meant that we had days, weeks, even, off school. Getting up late, drinking vast amounts of coffee, sort of easing myself into my chair to read some incredibly easy revision book about the plague or whatever the fuck I was meant to be revising. You want my revision technique? Well, seeing as the exams are over now and nobody's gonna steal it, here goes:

1: Wander into room. Drink water. Look nervously at exercise books full of detailed examples of everything we need to know.
2: Push exercise books onto the floor. Look in the nice simplified GCP revision book, which breaks everything down to the bare essentials, with many brightly coloured pictures and diagrams.
3: Make a list of things I don't know. This is the core of my revision techniques: only revise the stuff that you're SURE you don't know. And when I say 'don't know', I mean 'if a question related to this came up in the exam, I would have no fucking clue how to even start doing it, in fact I would be so confused I would end up knocking myself unconscious by accident with my pen lid'.This cuts out much of the chaff, leaving you with the tricky stuff, which really boils down to not being that hard after all.
4: You have a list of things you don't know. Doodle on this list. Choose the top topic from the list.
5: Take a brand new sheet of paper. Write the title of the topic you don't know on the top of the sheet in highlighter. Then, using a black pen, slowly and oh-so-carefully trace around the outside of your writing. When the pen has dried, add a highlighter underline. Trace round this too. If you're really feeling artistic, add another. Whatever, it's your revision session, go mad.
6: Look up the topic in the GCP book. Typically, a three week subject is condensed into half a page. Read the page, then write, like, two related words under the sheet of paper. Doesn't matter about how neatly you write, you're gonna throw it into the bin anyway. I managed to go through more than 100 sheets of paper in three weeks with this method.
7: Wander around the table, loudly talking to yourself about the topic, but often letting your mind wander off to various unrelated topics eg. the puffy bit of paint where the wall's gone damp, Cassie's boobs, the lyrics to 'London underground', Lucia's fear of anybody being angry at her, the nice stain on the carpet, etc. Once I managed to perform three full laps of the table while ruminating on the plot for Batman Begins before noticing that I'd sort of lost the track of whatever I was meant to be revising.
8: Carry onto the next topic until you get bored. If you still haven't understood the current one, get bits of paper out of the bin and spend ten minutes throwing them back at it while repeating key topic details to yourself.
9: Lose interest, leave room.
10: Watch an Episode of the OC (yes, I know, I'm an addict, fuck off). Have lunch. Browse the internet for like twenty minutes. Re-read your own blog. Watch Trisha, then a re-run of Big Brother. Then slowly trudge back to the revision room, lamenting the explonential growth of your 20 minute break.

So, yeah, that was my revision. And that was my revision at its most brutal and ferocious. Didn't get much more intense than that. And that was all in the last two weeks. Ha ha ha, I just remembered; they wanted us to do three hours a night for the entire Easter holidays, then six hour a day for every day of study leave.

Ahahahhahahahhahaha.

I would be seriously fucked off if I'd put all that work in and I end up with the pissy bunch of papers we got for the exams. My laclustre revision methods got me safely through every damn exam they threw up, with the notable exception of Triple Chemistry and Core Maths 2, but does anyone care about those? No? Seriously? And damnit, I was so looking forward to my career as a plastic chemicalist. Or whatever.

So, yeah, I can't REALLY say that the end of the exams is heralding a massive positive improvement to my social life (ha! I have a blog... it's like the internet equivalent of having both aids AND leprosy AND involuntarily spitting out razor sharp blood soaked needles AND listening to U2) but still, uh... actually, the end of the exams is actually detrimental to my social life. I'm actually going to see and interact with less people than I do usually. And I can't pull the "sorry, I gotta revise" excuse every time my mother asks me to walk the dogs/accompany her walking the dogs/do anything dog related/clear the table/mow the lawn/tell her the time/do anything. I was such a satisfyingly poor son; now I no longer have an excuse.

However, the end of the exams does mean that I can, like, spend some more time with my homies. And GET A GIRLFRIEND! (HAH! I'm an impressively unsucessful boatie with a blog... that's the dating equivalent of being a queer scottish footballer... yes, I went there) But hey, at least you're not a queer CHINESE footballer, eh?

And that stunningly inept link brings me onto the main subject of this post, which will probably be, ironically, shorter than the introduction: CHINA. Yes, we all know China is there. We can all point it out on a black map of the world. Ha. I mean, it's over in Asia somewhere. And, I mean, china has given us some of the cultural milestones of the world. For example, Famed Author Amy Tan with her blistering piece of prose 'Two Kinds' (as not used in the GCSE English exam by me), huge pointless terracotta armies, tea, fireworks, and long pointless walls. But, does anyone know the REAL china? Well, me, Joeseph and the Oggster set out on a journey today to find out.

So, we started our cultural voyage of China by checking out Chinese Movie 'Kung Fu Hustle'. Man, this was a funny film. First of all, all the actors talked in a silly make-believe language and all the REAL words were written across the bottom. And also, it's full of the most insane violence and comic skillz ever. I mean, the guy who wrote this must have been totally munted/smashed/destroyed/stoned off his HEAD. I mean, it's the sort of film that you discuss with your buddies when drunk.

"Yo, I got... I got this really good IDEA for a film, man."
"Oh yeah dude?"
"Yeah, it's like, in CHINA, and, like, there are all these OLD people man. And there are all these lunatics with axes and they, like, DANCE their way through the opening credits."
"China, man?"
"Yeah, sweet man, and like, everyone talks silly languages. And there's this old lady who runs at, like, a billion miles an hour."
"Sweet! There could be, like, this lunatic whos actually an old man but is actually the kung fu king and HE CAN FLY."
"And, like, these old people who can, like, do kung fu. And, like this one guy flies in to the air and steps on a bird. Then he meets Buddha in the sky."
"Kung fu?"
"You know it!"
"HIGH FIVE!"

Man, that is one MANLY film, despite the lack of Christopher Walken. There isn't enough Christopher Walken in films nowadays. Or, come on, the woman who played Barbara in the Goode Life. Man, she was fit. She should have been in more porno. But that bit with the woman getting shotgunned was sweet. Pay attention: there will be more shotgun related banter later.

After getting wildly overexcited by the amazing show of typical Chinese life depicted in Kung Fu hustle, we decided on our next Chinese related adventure. Then it hit us. LUNCH. So we went to a Chinese buffet (it's pronounced 'buffey'). Now, when the sign says "All you can Eat", I honestly don't think that you're supposed to take that as a wager. But that's how we saw it. Man, I ate so much rice today. And typical Chinese deep fried chicken. But Joe and Oli managed to outdo themselves. Oliver by being the world's most SHIT vegetarian, and Joe by eating half a duck, in conjunction with his four plates of everything else. Joe managed a really impressive feat of keeping going, despite the waiters's insistence on stealing his plate. I remember one heartwarming occasion.

Waitress: You want me to take your plates?
Ogg: Yes.
Me: Yes.
Joe *Mouth full of delicious duck*: Mrrfhsh.
Me: Don't take his plate.
*The waitress takes Oli's plate. She then tries to take Joe's.*
Joe: Mrrlaraharhphh.
Me: No, don't take the plate.
*The waitress leaves with Oli's plate.*
Me: Hey!

Chinese food is a delicate, delicious selection of specially blended dishes. If you end up throwing up at the end of it, Oliver, I think that you've kind of missed the point of the whole affair. Anorexic bastard. Oh well, I managed to keep my end up by drinking my own bodyweight in tapwater. It was water IN A JUG, but it was FREE! WITH ICE! So, yeah, feeling all bloated and sloshy, we sort of wandered into HMV, where I purchased what is possibly the BEST GAME EVER... Resident Evil 4.

This is seriously the biggest mofo of a game ever. Basically, you're this guy in a forest full of evil hillybillies with pitchforks. The hillybillies try to kill you. You kill them back, with an assortment of shotguns etc. And there's this really evil wanker with a bag on his head and a chainsaw. Thankfully, you get given a shotgun fairly early on, and THEN you get to use it ON WOMEN. Yes, that's right. You can SHOOT WOMEN with a shotgun. FROM BEHIND. Here's a list of things I've killed in this game so far:

About fifteen thousand hillybillies.
Many hillybilly ladies, or as they like to be called, "hillyjillies".
A cow that was stupid enough to get in the way of my repeated slashings.
Some snakes.
A crow... he was asking for it.
Some chicken. I ate its delicious eggs, threw some more eggs at a hillybilly, then killed the bird.

And THEN there's this big scary guy with a nice beard and wild eyes who keeps showing up and cackling madly, before LETTING YOU GO.

Important Supervillain Rule Number One: Never, EVER, half throttle your enemy, tell him your no doubt evil and cunning plan, THEN let them go. This is bad practise, and will result in the imminent shotgunning of your SPINE. By me.

So basically, this is the most manly game ever. Even more manly than me. AND, it was made by the Chinese. Well, if we're going to be factually accurate here, it was made by the Japanese. But the disk was probably made in Taiwan, which was next to China, and they hate each other, so it might have been made by a chinaman. And thus concluded our comprehensive study of Chinese life and culture.

THANKS CHINA!

You made this culture ALL BY YOURSELF. Well DONE.