Hazelnut's New Writeups

Killing in the Name (review)

2009-12-30T10:39:55Z

1992 single by professional pseudo-revolutionaries Rage Against The Machine. Became Christmas Number One in Britain in 2009. Total heap of rancid, worm-infested shyte - and the Rancid, Worm-Infested Shyte Liberation Front have probably just put a price on my head for that grave insult to their cause as a result of this writeup.

There is nothing revolutionary or subversive about this song - or indeed about RATM - in any way whatsoever, unless you're a 15-year-old who can't be arsed to tidy your room, get to bed at a reasonable hour, or do your homework. Which, incidentally, is what that chorus line, "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" sounds like. The song is a ham-fisted attempt at sounding rebellious and socially aware - much like everything else by RATM, actually - with its generic railing against the government and identikit pretend socialism.

A delicious irony is that those who pushed the Facebook campaign to get RATM to number one to keep the X Factor off…

December 29, 2009 (log)

2009-12-29T20:05:19Z

Today something happened to me that I thought only happened in urban myths.

I was nonchalantly checking my inbox and I found I had a message from an old university friend from my first year. We'll call her Heidi because that's almost her name. Oh aye, I wonder what she's got to say. So I click it and I find myself confronted by a farrago of pictures of her in increasing states of undress.

Once I'd surreptitiously saved them to my hard disk for future reference, I read the body of the mail. Turns out that she wanted to send these to the boy friend and accidentally clicked "Send to All" and we all got an eyeful of her undercarriage.

Whoops.

I think I'd best be very careful when I go oot on the tap on New Year's Eve in case I pull and find myself minus a kidney.

Bastard!! (review)

2009-12-09T22:16:36Z

I will add a writeup about the animé.

First up, biases on the table - I'm not an animé fan. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Ditto manga. The closest I'll get to either are certain French bandes dessinées and ElfQuest (which has manga influences, esp, the stuff from the late 1980s, early 1990s), but that's about it. I think there's something about the fandom that puts me right off, yano, people dressing up in Japanese schoolgirl outfits when they're I. male, and II. at least thrice the age of a Japanese schoolgirl, that sort of thing. So it was with great caution that I scored myself the animé series Bastard!!.

I think I should also explain what got me into Bastard!! as well. Metal, that's what. The author of Bastard!!, one Kazushi Hagiwara, is quite the headbanger, and it shows. Many characters, spells, and places in Bastard!! are named after heavy metal bands, or Engrishified versions of same. For instance, the protagonist, Dark Schneider, isn't…

The Ten Most Ridiculous Metal Videos Ever (review)

2009-11-27T23:47:43Z

Oh fuck a pig with Thor's hammer, I'm spoilt for choice on this one.

Yano how I wrote about the ten geekiest metal songs ever, and how if you're a metal band you can get a field full of overweight, oversexed, overbearing drunkards thrashing about to songs based on Warhammer 40k or Galactus or even arsing Nintendo games? Well, for the same reason you can do this, music videos like the following are made. Enjoy. They are all silly beyond belief and all totally rule.

10. Blind Guardian, "This World Is Sacred"

In one two-word sentence: ORCS MOSHING. Specifically, computer generated orcs moshing in a computer generated hall while a computer-generated version of the band performs on stage, like it's a cut scene from a video game. Which it is. Because this song, and the video to it, were released as part of the game "Sacred 2 - Fallen Angel." And they weren't just bundled with it - they were integra…

Dragon NaturallySpeaking (review)

2009-10-28T22:48:07Z

It's a programme, developed by a company called Nuance Communications, that allows you to talk to your computer and it'll write it down for you. It is advertised as being 99% accurate.

As long as you have low standards and your not all that alarmed by simple grammatical miss takes, like the ones in this paragraph for example. But then again, we live in the age of txtspk so it's maybe just moving with the times.

Occasionally it comes up with something totally alarming and hilarious.

Like when I tried to write a sharply worded letter to an opposition landlord in one of my firm's cases, said opposition landlord having illegally evicted our client, I accidentally asked the little hoogstraten that was the other side to "provide our client with cheese, that he may regain access to the moon formerly occupied by him."

Or when I advised a client that he may be able to approach his local Environmental Health Officer over "conv…

October 9, 2009 (idea)

2009-10-09T14:48:46Z

So Saint Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize. Care to expand on the why, anyone?

I mean, what's he done, seriously, that's concretely made the world a more peaceful place? What wars or oppression has he actually brought to an end? Solved the conflict in Palestine, has he? Ended the genocide in Darfur, has he? Put the boot into China until they leave Tibet alone, has he? Ended the military dictatorship and associated ethnic cleansing in Burma, has he? I mean, I don't see him exactly racing to pull the troops out of Afghanistan or Iraq, for that matter.

I await a list of appropriate deeds by return of node. Sources are required. "Giving hope" does not count. Seriously. To get a Nobel Prize for anything else you have to actually make the world a better place or discover something really significant. You can't get a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for inspiring people to become chemists, you have to go and discover magic acid or something. You can't get a Nobel Prize…