Latest Chris & Trilby comic: no. 0035 -
Heavens To Betsy
29/10/04:
Sit Down And Shut Up
Well, christ,
I've just got to tell you what happened last
night.
I've been going
down an open mic comedy bar every now and again
for the last few months, 'cos I've been thinking
about having a crack at it myself, and yesterday
I went there with new anxiety, because I had put
my name down for a slot.
Now, try to
understand precisely to what degree I was filling
my pants all of yesterday. I'm primarily a writer
of comedy. I've practised stand-up before, but
only alone, in the bathroom, with the door shut
in case anyone hears. So I didn't exactly have
optimum faith in myself as a performer. In fact,
let's not mince it, I was absolutely fucking
terror stricken as I made my way down to the bar
last night. I'd rehearsed my material but I had
next to no idea if it was funny or not. I had no
idea if the sort of stuff I post on this website
is genuinely amusing or if people just laugh
sarcastically and roll their eyes to each other.
To cap it all, I'm a whiney twentysomething
Englishman in a bar full of rowdy drunk
Australians who are all making jokes about
smoking, racism and wifebeating.
For the record,
I was planning on giving them edited highlights
of my Troy article from a while back, with some
funny bits I have since thought of added.
Anyway, I get
there and learn I'm sixth on the bill, and I sit
to watch the other comics and gain confidence in
myself. Confidence is the last thing on my mind,
however, as I witness comic after comic stand up,
get heckled, and be drowned out by the noise of
the clientele. One bloke came up, made one joke
and buggered off.
I'm not worried,
though, 'cos I'm wearing my lucky hat.
Then the
security man tells me to take it off, 'cos it's a
management rule.
Shit.
The fourth comic
has just got off stage to the supreme
indifference of a mean-spirited audience, and I'm
not having a good time. The fifth bloke is up
next, and I'm after that. The MC is half-way
through linking to the fifth act, and I've
already decided. During the next set, I'm going
to go to the MC and strike my name off the list.
Then I'm going to go home and cry me a river.
"Would you
please welcome," says the emcee, "Mr.
Ben Croshaw!"
SHIT.
SHIT SHIT SHIT
SHIT. Someone cancelled. SOME RAT BASTARD
CANCELLED BEFORE I COULD.
The introductory
music. The standard applause. Lurch up on stage.
Shake the MC's hand, take the mike, move the mike
stand aside. I'm doing this all on automatic. I
can feel my legs shaking uncontrollably,
imperceptible to the audience.
I become aware
that, with the spotlight in my face, I can't
actually see any of the audience. I take this as
a good thing, then I launch into my
well-rehearsed routine.
God, my voice
sounds stupid.
Stupid and
English.
First two jokes
and no laughs. Hell, I don't feel too bad about
it. With the decrease in visibility, I could just
be talking to a wall, and not a dissatisfied and
hostile audience.
I tell one of my
new ones. It's really bad. "Helen of Troy
eloped with the Trojan envoy, Paris," I say.
"Still, what can you expect of the
French?"
I get a laugh.
And I mean a
laugh, singular, for it was only one person. I
gesture in a vaguely thankful manner in the
direction it came from.
I do another new
bit, where I start comparing Helen of Troy to the
current Queen of England. Suddenly, I'm getting
laughs, and the bar's a lot quieter than I
remember. I'm so nervous that I'm shaking and
sweating and barking all my lines into the mic,
but as soon as I realise that the big empty void
in front of me is actually fucking laughing, I
start feeling a lot better about myself. I do the
Trojan Horse stuff. That's the end of what I had
planned, because I kind of assumed I'd bomb. So
the set ends somewhat awkwardly, and as soon as
the surprised audience starts clapping, I'm
regretting not adding a bit of my general stuff,
but I think I've had enough for a debut. I get
off stage, watch a couple more acts, then go
home, head buzzing.
So that was
that, the fulfillment of several years of
wonderment and a couple of weeks of extreme
shit-molesting stress. And I'm sorry about this
post, I hate bloggy updates more than anything,
but I really just wanted to tell someone. Anyone.
Everyone.
Well, since I'm
already blogging my little heart out, I suppose I
could also mention that I lodged my permanent
residence application yesterday. Two thousand
bucks, that cost me. Two grand to get a
bureaucrat to look at a piece of paper. So now
I'm as skint as a big skint thing. I'm sure I
need not remind you that you can still click here to donate and become the
highlight of my day! And advertising, don't forget. The
Exterminatus Now banner should probably have gone
down a while back, but I confess I (a) keep
forgetting and (b) can't be arsed.
Oh yeah, and
since I'm in such a good mood, I'm trying to
restart Chris and Trilby. Episode 0034 is up!
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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22/10/04:
I Say I Want A Revolution
What the hell
happened to mankind? There doesn't seem to be any
spark left in us at all.
The passion,
that's what I'm talking about. True,
blood-boiling, searing passion; what the fuck
happened to it? I'm not talking about the kind of
passion that goes on between man and woman as
they overcome adversity in the latest unnecessary
Hollywood remake, not the kind of watery passion
Mr. Darcy had for Lizzie Bennett's sweet
patootie, I'm talking about the sheer unbridled
animal rage passion that every man seemed to have
in the olden days.
Take the siege
of Troy, for example. A man's wife runs off with
some greasy foreigner, fine, that's a standard
enough story, but what does the man do? He
doesn't chalk it up to experience and blame
himself for marrying the town bicycle! He damn
well scrapes together the biggest army the world
has ever seen and goes to kick Troy's collective
arse. Che Guevara led a revolution, then when he
was finished, he went over to other countries and
tried to lead more revolutions. He wasn't content
to sit in the palaces of the fallen drinking
champagne from the rectums of beautiful women!
There was a whole collective evil empire out
there to thwart, and he was going to make a
difference! What the fuck happened to the passion
of old?
Everything seems
to be so backed up in bureaucracy and hesitation.
You wouldn't have anything like the siege of Troy
nowadays. If the Queen of England was kidnapped
by the French and taken back to France, the first
thing Tony Blair would do - besides click his
nasty little heels with joy - is go on TV and say
"This is an act of war we will not tolerate!
You can be pretty sure we'll definitely consider
thinking about sending a negotiator over at some
point within the next few years!"
Nowadays,
everyone seems to be emotionally dead, like
zombies in pinstripe suits. Trudging to work each
day to make a living, queueing up at McDonalds
for their daily fuel intake, coming home to
vegetate in front of the TV for hours on end. Our
lives and opinions are steered every second of
every day by media influences and subtle
marketing strategies, all of which directly and
indirectly for the sake of draining more and more
money from our pockets to give to corporations
who already have more money than they know what
to do with. The funny thing is, probably every
single one of these people would agree with these
sentiments, but none of them would ever do a damn
thing about it. Fuck, neither would I. I'm just
hoping I can stir people up with language and
hope someone else does all the work, and that's a
really shitty attitude.
Here's how it
usually goes when you try to stir up unrest in
today's era.
A: The world is
corrupt and ruled by profit-obsessed corporations
who treat human beings as little other than big
consuming mouths wearing designer jeans full of
cash!
B: I completely agree!
A: Ordinary people are intentionally forced into
boring ruts, throwing their entire lives away for
the benefits of their managers, just to be able
to feed and clothe themselves!
B: I completely agree!
A: It's about time we had a revolution!
B: I completely agree!
A: I'm going to start a revolution!
B: I support that!
A: Would you like to join my revolution?
B: No thank you, Pets Win Prizes is on!
It's the
entertainment industry, of course, which is at
the core of the problem. I won't point the finger
specifically at television or anything else,
because that's the sort of thing Columbine
parents do when they're not suing the games
industry for original sin or whatever the
travesty du jour is. The entertainment industry
is designed to keep the general public doped up,
happy and relaxed so they won't entertain silly
thoughts of storming the Winter Palace. Well, I
say, throw down your remote controls and your
Playstation controllers! Resist the doping
process!
We, as a
species, are in dire need of being bored. There's
too much TV and cinema and everything else to
prevent us from being bored nowadays, but boredom
is something we desperately need. Boredom is the
root of all revolution. And if you're thinking
you don't fancy the idea of being bored when
Half-Life 2 is on the horizon for all those
moneyed fuckwits who can afford a suitably
omnipotent computer to run the dratted thing on,
then consider the following diagram:
So, you have no
excuse. The silent majority already know that the
world is in need of change, and soon. So stop
reading this stupid website and start taking some
god damn action against this repressive
capitalistic society. Stop reading... NOW. I mean
NOW. Okay, you seriously should stop reading now
and get on with that whole revolution thing we
talked about. There's no point in reading any
further, there aren't any more jokes or anything.
FOR FUCK'S SAKE STOP READING THIS FUCKING ARTICLE
AND INSTIGATE ANARCHY YOU FUCKING DOUGHY TWATS!
STOP READING OR I'LL COME ROUND TO YOUR HOUSE AND
SMACK YOU IN THE FACE WITH A FUCKING SNOW SHOVEL!
AND I'LL DO IT TONIGHT!
Some point
around eight, probably.
I don't want to
miss the Simpsons.
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
FullyRamblomatic...
17/10/04:
Dizzy Downward Spiral
There's this new
online encyclopaedia (or 'wiki' as they're
apparently called these days, I was not aware
that the Ewok language has started to permeate
the collective consciousness) filled exclusively
with content about video games, and it's called State. And yes, they ARE open
to suggestions for a better name.
One thing that
struck me as I rifled through the A-Z was an
apparent focus more on old games than the modern
ones, and I was amused to find a section on
Dizzy, the long-running series of Commodore 64
adventures featuring as their protagonist an
ambulatory egg with a fixed grin and a death
wish. This is a topic I've covered before on the site, which is
why I feel it's worth covering again in frankly
exHAUSTive detail. I remind you that this is MY
SITE. If the content isn't catering to your own
personal tastes you can fuck off to Maddox and
try to bottle and sell his urine or something.
The Dizzy
section on 'State' was woefully bare in that it
listed all the titles but left the rest to one's
own sense of nostalgia, so I'm going to do the
world a service and provide a little profile for
them all. Let's dive naked together into a rich
and sensual lake of yolk and meringue!
Dizzy smiling bravely despite having been
sneezed on. |
*
Dizzy QUEST: The game that
started it all involves our hatchery hero
deposited inexplicably in a strange world
(you'll find this plot device resurrected
frequently in this article) where he must
do battle with an almighty wizard named
Zaks, who is eleven times his height and
can shoot lightning from his fingertips.
Kind of like how the climactic scenes
with the evil emperor in Return of the
Jedi would have gone if Luke Skywalker
was a woodlouse.
|
SIDEQUEST:
None, because they were obviously still settling
into the whole 'adventure with a piece of
breakfast food wearing boxing gloves who enjoys
sommersaulting aimlessly into certain death'
genre. FUN FACT: the protagonist for this game
was originally going to be a strip of bacon
wearing tapshoes with a lightning rod strapped to
his back.
AND ANOTHER
THING: Parts of this game were based on the poem
'The Green Eye of the Yellow God' by J. Milton
Hayes. This is why games were so much better in
the olden days. You'd never see a few levels in
the latest Tomb Raider sequel reference Marcel
Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu.
*
Treasure Island Dizzy
QUEST: Dizzy is
shipwrecked and washed up on a little island in
the middle of the ocean. But there only seems to
be ocean on one side of it, so I suppose it's
more of a peninsula than an island. But when you
cross the ocean you discover that it's only about
a hundred feet across, making it a river. So,
from an initial promise of 'sunbleached exotic
desert island', we have gone instead to Hackney
Marshes.
SIDEQUEST:
Collect thirty gold coins in order to pay the
extremely stringent customs official two rivers
across from where you start. This meant traipsing
back and forth avoiding all the deadly traps and
monsters with your horrendous aimless
sommersaulting, made all the more frustrating
by...
AND ANOTHER
THING: YOU ONLY HAD ONE LIFE. Good GOD. There
were traps it was virtually impossible to predict
would occur, Dizzy still jumped like a retard who
has become uncomfortably self-aware and seeks
only to end their unbearable retard existence,
and there was even a bit where you walked from
one completely safe room to one that was
completely UNDERWATER, and you only had ONE LIFE
to survive this ordeal with. Perhaps Codemasters
were trying to teach us a valuable lesson that
one has only one chance in the great game of
human existence, and to squander it is the
biggest tragedy of all. Fuck that - if I want to
learn that sort of crap, I'll go and watch
something directed by Sam Mendes.
*
Fantasy World Dizzy
QUEST: Dizzy's
little blissfully ignorant world was really
starting to take shape, because suddenly he had a
whole family of little egg-shaped freak things
and, importantly, a girlfriend to rescue. Some
evil dark overlord captured Daisy - Dizzy's ovum
of choice - and imprisoned her in one castle
while Dizzy was imprisoned in another. The weird
thing is, the overlord in question is never seen
or confronted at all. It's as if capturing two
chicken ovulations was the last thing on his
checklist before he left for OverLordCon 2000 in
Seattle.
| SIDEQUEST:
Again, gather thirty gold coins, this
time to assure Daisy that you can be a
loving, providing husband. For god's
sake, Daisy love, the guy just braved
hostile lands and rescued you from
certain breakfast! Now is not a good time
to discuss the mortgage! To put this into
context, imagine that you've just rescued
your girlfriend from a gang of drug
dealers, but she refuses to come home
until you've picked up the dry cleaning.
And imagine that the dry cleaners' is on
the top of Mount Doom. |
In fantasy world, mountains hover eighty
feet above the ground. |
AND
ANOTHER THING: Maybe I'm just looking too hard
for something to make fun of, but it always
seemed to me that Dizzy's family (the 'Yolk
Folk', arf arf fucking arf) each seemed to
exhibit a different form of drug abuse. 'Denzil'
was the party man too hopped up on goofballs to
realise he was standing around in an evil troll
castle two feet away from an unguarded fireplace.
'Dozy' appeared to slip constantly into shallow
comas. 'Dylan' might as well have been wearing
Rasta dreads and a rainbow vest. And Grand
Dizzy... well, er... old people take lots of
pills, don't they.
*
Magicland Dizzy
QUEST: Having
rescued his girlfriend/sister/stomach-turning
combination of the two in the last game, Dizzy
must now rescue all of the hitherto-mentioned
friends of his through a variety of methods and
defeat Zaks once again into the bargain. You have
to eventually make a deal with Satan to achieve
this, who turns out to be a pretty okay guy. It's
the high-protein equivalent of Dr. Faustus.
SIDEQUEST:
Gather twenty diamonds to give to Satan,
presumably because Satan wants to accessorise the
Cracks of Gehenna. Or maybe he just liked making
my fucking life difficult. I feel I should also
mention 'not shoving an electric drill through my
eye socket after being killed while trying to
ride a goddamned shark fin across a moat for the
eleventy-billionth time', which is one of the
tougher sidequests in this series.
AND ANOTHER
THING: A lot of the Dizzy games contained
references to bedtime stories, but Magicland went
the whole hog. There were situations taken
directly from the Billy Goats Gruff, Alice in
Wonderland, Aladdin, the Sword in the Stone, the
Frog Prince and even Elvira: Mistress of the
Dark, although when I was going through puberty
that was a different kind of bedtime story
altogether.
* Dizzy:
Prince of the Yolkfolk
QUEST:
Continuing the storybook theme, our hero must
awaken Daisy from magical sleepytime and banish
an evil troll from the kingdom. There was some
other antagonist responsible for the magical
sleepytime in question, but once again this
person is mentioned only in the manual and is
significantly absent from the game itself. Either
evil sorcerors are on a level with the Royal
Family in terms of how often they go on holiday,
or the programmers didn't have time between their
frequent drinking binges to draw proper sprites
for them.
Daisy, top left, looks like my fucking
mum. |
SIDEQUEST: Collect twenty
cherries so that Daisy can make Grand
Dizzy a delicious pie. Yes, Daisy is
unwilling to leave her dungeon in hostile
enemy territory until she can be in a
position to bake pudding as soon as they
get home. Dizzy, do yourself a favour and
hook up with some lower-maintenance gal.
Someone who knows how to shop in the
produce section of the supermarket, where
cherries generally aren't hidden behind
fence posts or balanced precariously on
top of spike traps. |
AND
ANOTHER THING: So the king knights Dizzy and
declares him Prince of the Yolkfolk. But I didn't
think it was possible for a king to simply
declare who was a prince. I thought you had to be
born one? Dizzy should surely be a Knight of the
Yolkfolk, although this is all academic because
the King only rules about forty screens of
kingdom and the Yolkfolk village is somewhere
outside his jurisdiction. So I don't know what
the hell he was playing at. We only have his word
for it that he even is the king. He could have
been a hobo who fell into a dumpster outside a
costume shop.
*
Spellbound Dizzy
QUEST: Finally,
Dizzy gets transported to a mysterious land, and
it's entirely his own fault. Something to do with
misreading an ancient book of spells, but our
hero and all his parasitic chums have been
teleported to some arse of a place, and it's up
to him, working all on his own as usual, to bring
them back. Something tells me that, if Dizzy ever
got fed up and left, the entire economy and
governmental system of the Yolkfolk would fall
apart, since he seems to be the only egg among
them whose wellies are not nailed permanently to
the floor.
SIDEQUEST: You
have to gather five magic stars for each person
you want to teleport back to Egg Central. So
we've had stars, coins, diamonds and cherries.
Sounds like the suits of a set of tarot cards
that fell on the floor and got mixed up with a
set of those playing cards with naked women on.
AND ANOTHER
THING: There's one more Dizzy adventure game,
Crystal Kingdom Dizzy, but I'm not going to cover
it in detail except to mention that it's the
first one where Dizzy finally gets to change
direction in mid-sommersault. But the feature
came too late. Dizzy's uncontrollable poinging
had become a part of the experience. All I could
think of as I played was that the character had
suddenly lost his deliriously suicidal charm.
And now, the
somewhat misguided arcade spin-offs!
* Fast
Food Dizzy
It's Pac-man.
With Dizzy. I really wish I could say there was
more to it than that, but there wasn't. You ate
pills and were chased by ghosts. Oh wait, I think
I remember that the ghosts had feet. So it was
completely different to Pac-man, after all. I
mean, feet!
* Dizzy
Down the Rapids
It's Toobin'.
With Dizzy. I really wish I could say there was
more to it than that, but there wasn't. You
sailed down a river on a raft thing, avoiding
things. Dizzy never seemed to have a good time
when water was involved, as our next entry
confirms:
* Bubble
Dizzy
| Finally, something
original. Cast to the very bottom of an
undersea trench, Dizzy had to make use of
his hitherto unrealised incredibly large
lung capacity to escape, by jumping onto
upwardly-mobile bubbles. The bubbles
didn't last very long before bursting,
and therein lay the challenge.
Interesting to note how Dizzy is somehow
dense enough to sink like a stone -
presumably someone hard-boiled him at one
point - but he can somehow still be
propelled upwards by sitting on an air
pocket the size of a marble. |
Guess what's going on, win a prize! |
*
Panic Dizzy
The Dizzy
equivalent of one of those toys you give
three-year-olds that consist of jamming
colourful, oddly-shaped pegs through a series of
correspondingly-shaped holes. Not as fun as it
sounds. Could only be as fun as it sounds if the
hypothetical peg and hole were both made of
extra-squeaky polystyrene.
* Kwik
Snax
Just too stupid
to talk about, which may or may not be a cunning
ruse to disguise the fact that I can't for the
life of me remember anything about it.
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
FullyRamblomatic...
10/10/04:
Quantum Meep
Guilt Trip Of
The Day: I AM 100% CERTAIN THAT I AM MORE
INTELLIGENT THAN A LARGE CHUNK OF THE WORLD'S
WEALTHY ELITE AND YET I HAD TO BORROW MONEY FROM
MY PARENTS TO PAY MY DOCTOR'S BILLS
Come on, guys,
what the hell happened? Three or four donations
then poof, no more. Is that the whole extent to
which you love me? I know I said you can click on
the ads to help the site, but that money goes
straight to Chefelf to pay for bandwidth costs and
his new white floppy hats. Only donations and
independent ad revenue goes into my pocket.
Bandwidth is covered, sure, but it'd be nice to
be able to pay for some advertising on some
popular site, or buy myself a takeaway every now
and again. All Major Credit Cards
Accepted!
Okay, guilt trip
over. I should probably warn everyone that
today's update is going to be pretty intellectual
with a lot of talk of complicated scientific
theories. So, for stupid people, I made an
alternative update, which you can read by clicking here. If you find yourself
unintimidated by my smarty man tough talk, stay
right where you are.
I read about
something that really caught my interest the
other day: the Quantum Suicide Theory. Warned
you.
I just found it
a really cool idea. Here's how it goes:
What the hell does this
mean? SCIENCE, AND LOTS OF IT! |
The
Quantum Suicide Hypothesis
As presented in pink textLet's
pretend that a man is in a desert
standing next to a huge bomb that's about
to go off. Chances are, the bomb will
explode and he will die. In ten million
cases out of ten million and fifty, the
man is going to be killed in the blast.
BUT - what with the
infinite number of scenarios inherent in
quantum theory playing out at the same
time, there must be alternate universes
in which the man somehow DOES survive.
Maybe the bomb fails to go off. Maybe he
defuses it by chance. Maybe he gets a
safe distance away. Maybe the Crow brings
him back to life in order to seek justice
against bombs everywhere. The point is,
in some form or another he continues
living.
|
Since it is pretty much assumed by
this theory that it is impossible to destroy a
person's consciousness, the consciousness of all
the versions of the man who got themselves killed
all instantly converge in the reality where the
man survived. So, from the point of view of the
man, whatever scenario he was destined for -
death or survival - he would always, from his
point of view, survive, because the dying
consciousnesses instantly switch over to the
living ones.
Now, I think
that's a fantastic possibility. Whatever happens
in life, you will always switch over at the point
of death to another version of your life where
you somehow survived. Intriguing! When I was a
teenager... ha ha ha ha. Sorry. Oh boy. 'When I
was a teenager'. I love saying that. I love not
being fucking seventeen anymore. Being an adult
is so fucking sweet!
Sorry, I'll
start again. When I was a teenager, I went
through the usual suicidal phase that all
middle-class nerdy teenagers do - every single
other middle-class nerd I've spoken to on the
internet has had a suicidal phase, it's like the
middle-class have some completely different form
of puberty that starts off with you wanting to
cut yourself and ends with you buying your first
packet of Pot Pourri, or something - and on a
couple of occasions I was right at the point of
taking the final step forwards and the resultant
five hundred steps downwards. But I decided
against it and went home. But here's the cool
part - maybe I did kill myself. In fact, scratch
the maybe, I DEFINITELY killed myself in
trillions of alternative realities, not some
metaphorical killing some small part of my
innocence nancy-boy way but the whole
skull-exploding brain firework display shebang,
but my consciousness just switched straight over
to some other reality where I decided not to, and
I was none the wiser!
And with the
trillions of possibilities inherent in quantum
theory, I'm getting killed literally every single
fucking second of the day, always switching over
afterwards to the reality in which I survived and
my consciousness continued living on.
Now that I've
realised this, suddenly life seems a lot sweeter!
As long as there remains even the slightest,
infitesimal possibility of my surviving every
dangerous situation I enter, I'm fucking
indestructible! Maybe from the point of view of
other people I'd be killed, in a hundred messy
ways, but from my point of view - the only one
that counts - I'd live on! If someone fires at
me, it'll always miss! If I fall off a bridge,
there'll always be a lorryload of mattresses
passing underneath! If I jam my fingers in an
electrical socket, swallow cyanide, hang myself
and release an angry tiger all at the same time,
then the power will suddenly be cut off, the
tiger will accidentally bite through the rope and
the cyanide will come flying out of my gullet as
soon as I hit the floor! I could stick my fucking
head in a blender and causality would still find
a way to muscle me through!
Of course, the
downside to the quantum suicide theory is that I
leave behind a million billion quantum realities'
worth of grieving readers and relatives to feel
guilty about, who weren't experiencing life from
my point of view and as such weren't fortunate
enough to board the quantum suicide train to the
more fortunate version of events. And then
there's the fact that I'll never be able to kill
myself if I ever really wanted to. And then, of
course, there still remains the issue of what
happens when you finally find yourself, no doubt
at the age of one hundred and twelve, facing a
death from which there is absolutely no
possibility of escape, assuming no-one invents an
immortality device in the next sixty-odd years.
The idea of
consciousness being indestructible lends itself
then to the idea of reincarnation, and that seems
like a total bum deal to me. I mean, I did
alright in this incarnation; I'm intelligent,
talented, incredibly modest, and I grew up in a
supportive environment that wasn't too short on
cash. I'm not sure I want to risk taking another
roll on the dice of fate. Next time I might come
back as a blithering idiot, born to a
fundamentalist Christian family. And the next
thing you know, I get elected President of the
United States of America.
- Yahtzee
updates - features - essays - reviews - comics - games - novels - about - contact - forum - links
Last Week On
FullyRamblomatic...
5/10/04:
Capital FUN-ishment
I think it's
pretty weak that, in a lot of American states,
you get killed if you kill someone else. I mean,
blimey, pretty much the first thing they teach
you at school after braining some kid with a gym
mat is that two wrongs don't make a right -
except in maths - so why is it alright for George
Bush to stuff his murderers with electricity up
the dilly-o morning, noon and night?
It seems to me
that the idea behind execution is that the
subject is just too incurably fucked in the head
to be allowed to live. But that's a load of old
bum. Most people who kill don't do it because
they're evil, or anything, I mean, you don't
generally see people dragging dead prostitutes
from an alley, rubbing their hands and cackling
with glee. People who kill just weren't brought
up to understand that a lot of people find having
their heads spiked with tyre irons rather
objectionable. Jeffrey Dahmer killed and ate
people as a response to finding them physically
attractive. I think that's kind of adorable. He's
like one of those dopey hopeless romantics from
American sit-coms.
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"How
was your date, Jeffrey?" "Ah,
terrible! It started well, but then she
tripped and fell into my mouth and I sort
of ate her."
"Oh,
Jeffrey! Will you ever be lucky in
love?"
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When
you think about it, when you overlook the
ingrained taboos of society and think for your
own fucking self for once, it doesn't make much
sense that murder is illegal when we still have
no idea what death IS, exactly. For all we know
the human body is merely a stopping-off point
where we learn wisdom and patience in preparation
for the next, ultimate state of existence, beings
of pure light, at one with the universe and with
minds encompassing a thousand galaxies. And for
all we know, you only get to do all this if you
die before you turn 40. In that case, being
murdered could be the greatest thing anyone ever
does for you. Admittedly there's no reason for
assuming any of this is true, but then there's no
reason for assuming that our lives are governed
by a magical man in the clouds who really hates
gay people, either.
And even if you
give the old 'but a loved one was taken away from
their families causing enormous grief' shit, I
could point out that the world is fantastically
overcrowded - a problem not helped at all by the
Christian idea that there's no such thing as too
many kids - with not enough resources to go
round, so by killing a random stranger I may have
made his wife blub for a few weeks but I have
also made life fractionally better for the world
as a whole with one less mouth to drain
resources. Er... shit. I mean, erm... by killing
a random stranger, SOME HYPOTHETICAL PERSON has
made life better for the world etc.
So execution
isn't fair. And it's certainly not fair when
America can't even figure out a painless way of
doing it. Firing squads don't even aim for the
head. Gas chambers are supposed to be incredibly
painful. Electrocution stings like a bitch.
Hanging, when it doesn't work properly, can take
upwards of forty-five minutes. Forty-five
minutes! You could be hanged, and you could
dangle their squawking and shitting yourself for
an entire episode of Cracker before finally
succumbing. Even lethal injection gets botched,
because it's carried out by orderlies who can't
always find the vein properly. Doctors have this
thing called the Hippocratic Oath that prevents
them from taking a life. Yeah, nice skive there,
doctors. I bet, at school, you were the kids who
pretended to be Muslims to get out of PE.
So, for the
benefit of the world, I'd like to nominate a
couple of new ways to execute people you could
consider, both of which are guaranteed painless
and dignified.
1. DEATH
BY 12-GAUGE
| Step
one - the subject is stood in front of a
large wall of tough fibreboard, or sheet
steel, or something else that isn't
easily damaged by gunfire, and his right
temple is held against the wall. Step two - a
loaded 12-Gauge shotgun with the end sawn
off is held pointed at the hard extrusion
of bone just behind the left ear. The gun
barrel is held about five inches from the
skin, angled towards the brain.
|
 |
Step
three - the subject is informed how awesome this
is going to be.
Step four - the
subject nods in grim agreement.
Step five - the
shotgun is fired, instantly powderizing the brain
and upper skull in a cloud of buckshot. No pain
is felt, because by the time the brain should be
registering it, it's already dripping pinkly down
the wall like the contents of Peter Jackson's
prop bucket.
HOW HARD WAS
THAT, AMERICA? Simple, painless, and fun. Why
muck around with hanging ropes that make people
shit themselves for forty-five minutes when you
can just blow their faces off and get back to the
almond curry you're making for tea? Well, I
suppose this isn't a very dignified way out, so
let me detail my second idea:
2. DEATH
BY JEFFREY DAHMER
I've said it
before but I'll say it again: I really think
Jeffrey Dahmer was a really, really nice guy, and
certainly didn't deserve being raped and beaten
to death in prison. It's not his fault he thought
killing and eating someone was an ideal
Valentine's gift. So, I say, let him use his
quirk for the good of society, and help some poor
misguided souls have a good send-off.
Step one -
subject and Jeffrey are introduced to each other,
and move into a small, intimate New York
apartment with every conceivable luxury provided.
Step two -
subject and Jeffrey are encouraged to go on long
romantic strolls, eat in expensive restaurants,
stargaze together, crash on the sofa watching
Julia Roberts movies all night, in order to
blossom the feelings of affection in Jeffrey's
lunatic brain. Should difficulty arise, Jeffrey
will be given a book of professionally-arranged
erotic photographs of the subject.
Step three -
unable to contain his lust, Jeffrey kills the
subject painlessly by poison while they sleep,
then, if he's so inclined, has his way with the
body until sunrise.
Step four -
Jeffrey uses the flesh to make a series of
splendid meat dishes, perhaps braised in a little
white wine sauce or stewed with vegetables in a
casserole, so that the subject can die with the
knowledge that their body is being treated with
utmost respect by an appreciative collector.
Nothing is wasted - the hair is sold to
wigmakers, bones go into making stock, and the
toenails are ripped out and hidden in packets of
crisps. For a laugh.
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
FullyRamblomatic...
3/10/04:
MONEYYYY
Thanks first of
all to James P Wethe and the tastily-named
Mistique Bacon for their donations, respectively
15 and 20 dollars. Think of all the McDonalds
extra value meals that will buy! About six! Whoa!
Incidentally do let me know if you'd rather
donate anonymously; I know some people like to
keep an air of philanthropic mystery, like a
shadowy black man in a big coat buying a teddy
bear for a terrified orphan child.
Also, if you're
the sort of person who has been using the
internet for so long that you automatically
mentally screen out banner ads, scroll back up
the page and you'll notice at the top a couple of
new additions. The Google ad at the bottom was
given to me by Nate - now, if you want to help
out the site, all you need do is click that
banner once or twice every time you come to the
site. Really no effort at all, and you're doing
your bit. It's an extremely small and stingy bit,
but a bit nonetheless. Go click it now, I'll
wait.
...
No, don't read
down here yet, click the banner. You don't even
have to read the site it leads to. Just click and
you're helping us out.
...
Oh for god's
sake - it's TWO FUCKING SECONDS of your TIME, you
BASTARD.
...
Done? Good. Now,
the top banner is the very first instance of me
selling ad space independently. Garry, fellow
Brit and dearly beloved writer of Exterminatus Now, paid twice my requested
rate for that ad, so help him justify that
extravagance to himself by paying his site a
visit. If you like comics, and dark humour, and
Sonic the Hedgehog, it'd be right up your street,
you magnificently specialised individual!
Garry's comic is
full of characters who don't wear pants, which
isn't unusual in the sub-genre of furry art, but
there are certain characters who do. Which leads
me to wonder. Is this some kind of pants
heirarchy, wherein actually putting on pants and
covering your free-floating furry member is some
kind of status symbol? Is it a reverse pants
rule, so wearing pants is actually frowned upon?
Or is it just some kind of pants-optional
community?
I asked Garry
about it, and he replied 'yes'. So that solves
that.
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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