The rants and raves of a thoughtful teenager

YouTube comments are stupid and Amy Winehouse

2007-12-02T17:00:00.000Z

Here's a quickie for ya'll: what is it with people and giving others negative ratings on their video comments? For instance, I wrote a quick response to a clip from the Adam Sandler movie, 'Click'. Overall, great film but wow that ending woz cheesy and I feel that it ruined the whole movie.

My actual response was, "I didn't like the ending of him back in the shop. It killed an amazing movie with a cheesy, typical ending. Other than that, like I said an amazing film. My favourite scene of all time." Am I correct in saying that this is a fair comment? Well I check back a couple of days later to find that I have a -4 rating on my post...why!? Are people that protective over things that they love and will go to extreme lengths to penalize any who contradict them in the slightest way?

I also posted a comment on another video which, long story short ends with Amy Winehouse lying in a ditch somewhere with wolves nibbling at her foul, putrid flesh. I mean, you would have thought that her hideous mole would have put the wolves of their dinner, but they kept at it. Does that deserve a -7 rating too?...

Kids TV is evil

2007-10-22T02:03:00.000+01:00

What annoys you more than anything else? Maybe the bus is constantly late, or those evil volunteers who hand out flyers at the mall, determined to waste as much of your time as possible while you’re just trying to go about your business, or maybe MacDonalds are selling Coke Zero to accommodate for the more health conscious individuals, who by drinking it reduce their sugar intake from 0.5% to zero, but ironically still order a Big Mac and large fries with extra salt.
Me? I discovered the visceral horror that is children’s product advertisements.

For some random reason, we recently acquired the Cartoon Network channel for the purpose of receiving mass quantities of mindless entertainment in dangerously high dosages, a notion which I now realise is just as likely as Siegfried and Roy tearing the head off an orangutan and drinking it’s fresh, spurting blood for sustenance. Regardless of the original intentions, I found the shows entertaining for the first five minutes (the reason for that being that I am an animation enthusiast and decided to give them a chance) but was quickly engulfed in the evil realm of the commercial break. Commercial after commercial after commercial... over and over again in the exact same order for every mind-numbing break, broken up by five minute portions of a crappy kids show. I can now flawlessly recite the entire Cartoon Network advert line-up, a fact that I am ashamed at myself for knowing, and am haunted for life by their contents.

I never realised until now how annoying and exploiting these advertisements are. The worst breed are the commercials for girl’s baby toys such as T.I.M (‘This Is Me’ if you did not know) and Baby Annabelle. “Look, she knows her mummy” exclaims a six year old girl, to which another more mesmerised girl replies with an elongated “Wow!” Yes, wow! Kids really want to buy a baby manufactured from recycled condoms that pees and craps at their command. It’s actually quite sick and sadistic when you think about it like that.

Another commercial advertises a Barbie Girl digital camera and “real MP3 player!”, what an utterly pointless combination if you ask me, and is presented by three slutty American teenage girls acting like six year olds who use the words ‘wicked’, ‘cool’ and ‘totally’ way too often. That is what they are brainwashing young girls into acting and thinking like. What next? ... “With every Barbie you will get a wicked cool tampon and totally awesome training bra for free!!”

So what is the answer to this growing epidemic? My solution is to burn the douche bags that run the programs and bury them in my basement, along with all the rotting cigarette company owners, drug dealers, Gwen Steffani and professional footballers. Hate me if you will but at least revel in the obvious points that I have made before you reach for the axe.

Video games...have they crossed the line?

2007-10-21T21:08:00.000+01:00

My name is Chris Oakley. I am a 16 year old British teenager. I work hard, have a laugh and have plenty of good friends. I play violent video games often. I see a lot of ‘mature’ content in the media. I often think about violence and dark humour whilst going about my daily life. I sometimes get upset and feel slightly depressed.

But here’s the problem...After so many years of seeing violence, racial hatred, sex, drugs and foul language in my entertainment outlets, I have never felt the urge to shoot up my school and massacre my friends and fellow students. I have never strangled a puppy, bombed a train or stuck an infant to a railway track... is there something wrong with me? No!? Oh that’s right! Violence in video games doesn’t make even the most clinically sane individuals go out wielding a Mac-10 or pipe-bomb in the faces of random innocent members of the public. Forgive me for believing otherwise.
For you see the media has informed me (because when have they ever been wrong?) that even the most minute outbreak of fisticuffs on-screen causes children to become sadomasochistic freaks of modern society.
But when you see the so called ‘icons’ of youth entertainment parading themselves shamelessly on magazine covers, TV shows, movies and of course video games, half-naked, or half-dressed as the optimist inside me urges to call out, toting a ridiculously elaborate yet utterly pointless weapon of some sort, you have to wonder why it is no surprise that teens and games have such a negative relationship with the level-headed, never wrong parents and politicians in the world.

I am a great fan of many kinds of video games and visual media. I would be thrilled to have a future career in the industry, and it is completely outrageous that the majority of crap that so called ‘games developers’ pedal out into the hands and minds of today’s obnoxious gangsta youth (who ironically do not even know how to spell gangster in real English) is allowed to be distributed and acclaimed by the clueless gamer who sees the lumbering sasquatch 50 Cent to be a God amongst men. And yet more mature titles such as Rule of Rose or God of War get slated by the general public who, funnily enough, probably never even played the games or saw any preview of them whatsoever, create an uproar in the press and are condemned by the ‘powers that be’ for often innocently tackling a touchier, maturer subject. I hardly think that seeing a minor pre-rendered scene of sexual interaction with an adolescent girl is going to turn me into a serial rapist. You?

The point of this neurotic rant is that video games do not destroy youth.
You can clearly see that my head is screwed on straight and I am exposed to violence all the time. Rather regrettably, my seven-year-old sister is exposed to the extreme gore and horror of Gears Of War, F.E.A.R and such titles, and she is virtually completely unaffected by it. Thank God I am not an adult, when the laws of psychological child abuse take effect.

The rare, shocking events like the Columbine Massacre and the murder of James Bulger are not directly linked to video games. It is down to those kids’ daily lives; their home life, social interactions, background etc., not whether a game recreating counter-terrorism depicts a terrorist being shot down by life- saving soldiers. What next, Doom inspired Adolf Hitler?... Think about it.