Useless Disturbing Nature Facts 2 - Everything is Evil

As we all know, Nature is wierd. It gives us giant venemous lizards, bees that have gangbangs, shrimps with guns and octopi with penis arms. But sometimes, you have to look at some of the things evolution has given us and wonder if Mother Gaia still harbours some kind of grudge for paving over all her beautiful green fields and whatnot. Because sometimes, animals and plants don't just turn out wierd. They turn out completely sadistic, the kind of things you don't want to see in a dark alleyway and make Jeff the Killer seem like a cheery kid's bedtime story.

So without further adieu, Useless Disturbing Nature Facts 2 - Everything is Evil.

• Strangler Figs are evil because they do just exactly what their name implies. Once they germinate in the branches of a tree, they wind their massive roots down the trunk and into the ground, whilst spreading their own leaves up above the tree's own leaves. The roots basically girdle the tree - that is, they cut off the supply of nutrients from the roots by crushing the xylem in the bark - whilst stealing water and nutrients from the tree's roots, while the leaves steal the sunlight the original tree needs. For comparison, imagine being slowly strangled to death whilst some other jerk eats your food and watches your T.V. So basically, children like to play hide-and-seek in the roots of serial killers.
• Coral Snakes are evil because they all look alike. It's not enough for them to be incredibly venomous to the point of being lethal to humans, they've also got to have very similar patterns of red, black, white and yellow bands on their bodies to advertise what massive jerks they are. In fact, many unrelated species of coral snake share remarkably similar patterns, reinforcing the protection both species share. It's gotten to the point where the birds that used to prey on them are scared to death of anything remotely patterned like a coral snake.
• Golden Eagles are evil because they eat tortoises. That doesn't sound so bad - after all, they gotta eat somehow. The problem is that the eagles go out of their way to make the tortoises' final moments as painful as possible. See, trying to open a tortoise's shell is like opening a tin with your fingers, so what the eagle does is snatch up a tortoise, carry it as high as they can and then drop it onto a collection of sharp rocks to break the shell. Now, keep in mind that the shell of a tortoise is part of it's body - the spine and ribs form the distinct dome shape you associate with the animal. The eagles are basically ripping the tortoises in half. For such a glorified bird, that's kind of a dick move.
• Special mention goes to the Red-Backed Shrike of Britain, which has some seriously fucked-up eating habits. These cute little balls of feathers keep larders of food, which consist of corpses impaled on the thorns of bushes like a serial killer's art collection. What's even more disturbing is that they also use this larder to impress potential mates as well, with only the freshest corpses standing a chance. It's like trying to get a girlfriend who likes you because you have the posters for only the latest slasher films on your wall. Let that sink in for a moment.
• Wolverines are evil because... well, let's put this into perspective. This thing is about 42 inches long and weighs about 25 kilograms. And yet it's prey includes such animals as caribou, sheep, deer, elk and moose. Animals that are at the most three times it's own weight. They do this by climbing onto rocky outcrops, and then jumping onto their backs when they pass by. These things even routinely hunt bears, using the same tactic and biting them over and over until they die of blood loss and exhaustion. Of all the animals to base a beloved Marvel comics character on, the wolverine has to be the most psychotic.
• Toothpick Fish are evil because they render you sterile. I'm not even joking. What they do is that they swim around in a circle, trying to sense traces of urea in the water from the gills of another, bigger fish. Then they slip inside the fish's gills, stab them with their dorsal spines until the blood starts flowing, and then drink it up. Now, what part of the human body produces urea that would be a likely target for a hungry toothpick fish? You're welcome.
• Cane Toads are evil because they're randy bastards. To elaborate - Davian behaviour is the scientific term for necrophilia in the animal kingdom. In most cases, it's instinctual, and the animal involved probably doesn't even realize that hot tail their after isn't so much hot as cold. But the cane toad not only humps corpses - it humps corpses of any animal, regardless of species. Not just other frogs and toads, but snakes, lizards, salamanders and small mammals as well. Imagine Dirk if he lost all his inhibitions - wait, on second thoughts, don't.
• Mantidflies are evil because their babies eat spider babies. What the mantidfly does is that it catches a spider, but doesn't kill it - it lays its egg on the spider's abdomen, just where it can't reach. Then, when the spider lays eggs and weaves a protective silk ball around them, the mantidfly larva sneaks in and eats them up before they hatch. Granted, they're ridding the world of more spiders, which is a good thing, but just imagine what the spider mother must feel when she finds out what happened. That's just cold, Mantidfly.

Next time on Useless Disturbing Nature Facts - the prehistoric fish that moves faster than a car!

Escape

Imagine, if you can, a sky without stars.

It's not that hard, really. If you live in the city, or have been fortunate to go out into the city at night, you'll know very well what it looks like. All that light from the streetlamps blocks out the light from the stars, turning it completely black. Not a speck or spot of those cosmic pinpricks is visible - the whole thing is a shadowy canvas stretching from horizon to horizon as far as you can see, the depth of which you can only estimate as you gaze up at it.

With me so far? Good. Now, try to imagine that in the middle of the day.

12:20, to be precise. Because that is the exact time this story begins.

Look down.

At this time, on this world, Rutledge Asylum and Foster Home for the Gifted is the only source of light here. The whole building is a mass of metallic cylinders, lumped together as if a child has squashed his plasticine sausages into a bunch, and the beams of the searchlights glancing off its curved surfaces lend the entire construct an ethereal, almost beacon-like glow in the darkness surrounding it. Every window is alight, each one an eye gazing down into the blackness around it, as if daring some monstrous thing to come out and challenge it. The asylum, in a nutshell, is glowing.

And baying with the sound of alarms.

Zoom in.

-------

"YOU ARE A PAIR OF DRUNKEN LUNATICS!"

The words aren't so much shouted as yowled, although it's hard to tell where exactly it came from over the roar of the engine. The vehicle is a jeep in the same sense that a child's stick figure is realistic human anatomy - the crudely bolted-together lumps of metal only bear a passing resemblance to the original article, and black smoke belches from places it probably shouldn't belch from. The entire thing rattles and shakes as it swerves back and forth on the bumpy forest road, and the many, many near brushes with the surrounding trees suggests the driver isn't entirely there, either. The whole ensemble reeks of oil and ozone.

A head and shoulders lean out of one of the windows, black hair whipping in the wind, and whoops as a fist is lifted in the classic victory gesture.

"Faster, Carol, faster!" it screams. "I can still hear their sirens!"

"YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO HEAR THEM," retorts the original voice from within, "IF THIS THING WRAPS ITSELF AROUND A REDWOOD! SLOW DOWN!"

"Aw, come on, Crusoe!" pipes up a third, female voice from the driver's seat. "Why don'tcha try livin' a little? WHEEEE~"

The thing swerves dangerously, and there is a hiss of metal as it scrapes another tree, bark flying. The sound is matched in volume only by the animalistic shriek of terror from within as the tail end swings out far too much to be safe in any degree. Carol, if that is the driver's name, seems to pay no mind to this, merely laughing in glee as she steers the vehicle on it's careening path. Only the sputtering headlights on the front give any indication or warning of the terrain ahead, and it's highly unlikely the driver is in any state to pay it any attention.

"ROBERT!" howls the voice of Crusoe from within the back of the jeep. "WAKE UP, ROBERT, FOR GOD'S SAKE!"

The only response to this panicked yelling is a groan, barely audible over the thundering of the ramshackle engine. But it's the sort if groan that immediately communicates that all is not well with the person it belongs to, and it tells Crusoe, whoever he is, all he needs to know about his friend's current situation.

"SPARKLE?! DANIEL, YOU LET HIM TAKE SPARKLE ON TOP OF ALL THAT ALCOHOL?!"

"Hey, he was the one," retorts the man leaning out the window, "who said we couldn't do this! And now... now look at us! Those fucker's can't possibly catch us now!"

Something within the belly of the vehicle begins to glow.

"We fucking escaped from Rutledge, man!" shouts Carol, yanking back on the steering column and leaping their conveyance over a ditch. "We're fucking KINGS!"

The stink of ozone is overpowering.

"I SWEAR TO ALL THE NINE CIRCLES, IF WE SURVIVE THIS, I AM GOING TO what smells like time?"

VROP

And then they are gone.

The time is now 12:21. Remember this.

-------

"So you're telling me that three of our patients..."

"Yes, sir."

"...and how many bottles of Scorpion were-?"

"An entire crate, sir."

"...and they took the cat with them?"

"Yes, sir."

"And despite having access to our top-of-the-range helicopters and assault jeeps, you somehow manage to lose them after tracking their shoddily-built escape vehicle for at least two miles?"

"Two and a half miles, sir. It was going pretty fast, sir."

The man sat back and placed a hand to his forehead, groaning.

"Oh, I can just see the paperwork coming in..."

Reaper Man - A Darksiders 2 Poem

Sing with me, folks.

Reaper Man, Reaper Man,
Does whatever a Horseman can.
Doesn't need gun or knife,
'Cause he's got a big scythe.
Look out!
Here comes the Reaper Man!

Is he strong? Look at him!
He's what we call a Nephilim!
Runs on walls, rides a horse,
And kills demons, of course!
Hey there!
There goes the Reaper Man!

From beneath the mask
He seeks out his next head.
So don't dare to ask
If he swings from a thread!

Reaper Man! Reaper Man!
Angry neighbourhood Reaper Man!
Forget War, Fury or Strife!
Killing is this guy's life!

To him
Life is a great big ruckus.
Wherever there's a fracas
You'll find the Reaper Maaaaaaan!

Jack Thompson - A Rant

(WARNING: This post was made at God knows what time in the morning. Hence, there will be a greater amount of swearing, bile and typos than normal. Reader discretion is advised.)

Over the past few weeks, a combination of University stress and general boredom have been causing my tension levels to rise to somewhat uncomfortable levels. And although I have managed to let off a good whine or two in Chatzy about problems that apparently only I can see, I haven't had anything that has been actually worth getting angry about come up in conversation yet. What I need at the moment is a good long rant - something to blow off steam and help me calm down and not lash out at my good RP buddies.

So thank you, Jack Thompson. Thank you for this chance to unwind by calling you a psychotic little dickbend.

I know people will say I'm beating a dead horse - making fun of the recently disbarred, anti-gamer attorney general is nothing if not low-hanging fruit, after all. But up until now, I've always assumed that the man was at least sane in some degree, if a little bit misguided in his attempts to censor gaming culture. Then I discovered his page on Wikiquote, and Jesus Crunchy Christ on a pogo stick, all of what I could only call "tolerance" for the man went out of the window faster than Max Fucking Payne doing another of his crazy bullet-time stunts. If the page is to be believed, JT is a dangerously unhinged, self-glorifying cock-gobbler with the same grasp on reality God would bestow to the average nematode worm. Except that would be an insult to nematode worms - at least they have some sort of function in the natural world.

I'm not going to link to the page, because I assume everyone reading this has access to Google at the very least, but here's the general gist for you people. This man, this lowlife masquerading in human form, has literally come to believe that the word "gamer", a term tentatively used even in the best of circumstances, denotes some kind of fantastical fucking religious movement or subhuman species. He literally claims that gamers are incapable of rational though or reasoning because Grand Theft Auto is a brainwashing device, apparently, and that anyone who plays games is a future Boston Strangler or Columbine Massacrer waiting to burst from it's cocoon like some filthy fly. He has blamed Half-Life, one of the greatest PC games of all time, for the Virginia Tech massacre, not even bothering to do his research beforehand, and talks down at gamers as though they're Alice in fucking Wonderland, claiming they are incapable of connecting with reality where "grown-ups" get this done. And all the while, the smug bastard constantly builds himself up as an avatar of God, a righteous, infallible messenger sent to cleanse the world of the sinful gamer plague and rid the world of anything that might damage our children's minds. Oh, and he sometimes talks in third-person, just in case he doesn't sound retarded enough.

Most of the time, I would just laugh. As someone who doesn't play video games that much, yet sympathises deeply with the problems facing today's gaming culture, I would merely tolerate the ravings of this senile old fogey trying to prove his law degree wasn't a complete waste of money. The self-glorification, the flimsy arguments, the ham-handed attempts at enforcing what little legal power he has - I would have been able to dismiss it all as the ramblings of a harmless old wierdo and move on, confidently playing Mortal Kombat safe in the knowledge that I would not be inspired to slice up my classmates, no matter what the Daily Mail says.

And then I saw the quote comparing gamers to the fucking Hitler Youth.

Listen up, you pasty-faced, shit-spewing old fart. You can call gamers many things. You can call us fat nerds who don't get out much and subsist on pizza and Wotsits (the Brit equivalent of Cheetos). You can call us wierd for forgoing human compansionship for a few hours just to beat those last few levels on Call of Duty. But when you have the balls to compare us to the subjects of an evil brainwashing scheme created by history's biggest prick, that's where you cross the fucking line. That's where you shut your giant twat-mouth up, take a good step back and listen to what the fuck you're saying, because at that point you begin to sound exactly like the brain-damaged future serial killers you have invented in your ongoing quest to demonise an important setting stone in cultural development. I'm not joking - you sound exactly like your dipshit of a mother dropped you on your head when you were a baby, which wouldn't surprise me.

What you don't seem to realise, you is-dribbling, donkey-headed circus child, is that there is no actual conspiracy behind the gaming movement, despite whatever your mad ocelot god may tell you. Games companies do not have some massive machinations in place to turn us all into mindless zombie slaves in the hopes of one day taking over the world like a James Bond villain. Zelda was not created to train us in sword-fighting, because Link's sword fighting technique bears as much resemblance to the real article as my arse does to the Turin Shroud. Games companies exist, first and foremost, to make money, like every other company does. And they do this by creating products that we can enjoy and talk about, like every other company. And to imply that this is the same as Hitler covertly teaching little children army drills and to hate anything other than blond-haired, blue-eyed Supermen is not only incredibly fucking disrespectful to the memory of those who suffered in Nazi Germany, it's also incredibly disrespectful to the video games companies who don't even have or want the kind of resources required to raise their own private armies. Simultaneously insulting and offensive in one backhanded middle finger. Well fucking done.

And it's not even like you've got any evidence to clarify that point, either. You've just made the assumption because you want to feel good about yourself. You want to demonise gaming culture so you can jerk off to how clever you think you've just been, because why would a messenger of God need to prove that all gamers are psychos? Have you not ever heard of games that don't involve pointing a gun at something? Like Tetris? Oh, wait, you'd probably invent some bullshit about how Tetris is a Freudian symbol for anal sex and therefore is unconstitutional. You're building your entire argument around a stereotype that is both completely incorrect in the majority of cases and was almost always based on uninformed, scaremongering dick-baggery, with your head too far up your own arse to realise that you need things called arguments and evidence to back your claims. Admirable, in a way - making your arguments look like a Year 7 student's shitty history essay takes real effort.

Moreover, you need to realise that video games are not some alien force created by Satan to turn us all into the real/life equivalent of the Combine (although that would make a kickass movie if Jack Black and Leonadro DeCaprio were in it). Video games are a huge stepping stone in our evolution as a race, the cutting edge of a whole new form of technological and cultural development - Interactive Media. Now, while I'm not one to claim that games are art because I'm not the right sort of person to debate that issue, such a development is as important to humanity as the day Leonardo Da Vinci scribbled out his first flying machine drawing, as it's one of many measures of how far our technology has come from those days of hiding in caves and stabbing rhinos for breakfast. And as society develops and becomes more accepting of things like sexuality and the occasional knife-fight in a crowded street, games evolve to reflect those changes in attitude. To build this entire ass-backwards campaign based on decrying blood and tits in video games shows that not only are you trapped in the mindset of your childhood past before your first damning changing-room stiffy, but that your are inherently opposed to the development of technology, culture and society. You are literally trying to stop humanity from progressing by pulling the old Godwin's Law farce on us. That is not a thing to be proud of. That is a badge of shame made of frozen turd and you should feel ashamed.

In short, well done, you miserable old fuck. You have finally gotten me angry enough to devote an entire blog post to how manically damaged you really are. I'd end this post by saying thank fuck you've been disbarred, but I personally think that's too good for you. What I think should have been done was that you ought to have been dragged from your home, put out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, tied to a block of concrete and thrown into the sea. And eventually, your corpse would have reached the stinking slime and rot on the ocean floor that is your real home.

There, I feel much calmer now.