Toxoplasmosis World

The mist was just beginning to clear, revealing more of the brown smear of trees by the road. There was no other traffic as we drove towards Tarnmouth in the jeep. Inside I was wearing a full body bioproctection suit made of the highest quality linen.
“It’s up here, about four hundred yards out.” Says 6. I give him the thumbs up as we turn up a muddy track, the tyres cracking the frozen mud beneath. Ahead of us are the first finished houses in a new suburb that had been partly built, the buildings a mix of yellow brick and concrete painted grey. Great care had been put into the design of the architecture as they each represented the perfect mathematical equation for what the most economic, eco-friendly building could be through being designed by a computer. Rather than stirring up any kind of interest or emotion, all that the new builds inspired was ennui.
“This is as far as I go.” Says 6.
“Thank you.” I say, getting out of the jeep. It’s cold outside. I begin to walk up the unfinished road.

The streets are empty, although I can hear noises coming from inside the houses. There is a strange atmosphere in the air, the same quietness as if out in new snow. I walk up the drive of one of the houses and let myself through the front door. The walls were decorated bizarrely, striped wallpaper patterns beneath pictures nailed to the wall at varying heights. I sat in a perspex globe suspended from the ceiling by a black chain when a horn sounded behind me. I jumped, spinning round to see a man dash out of a doorway. As he continued to run he seemed to step into his clothes and disappeared in a wriggle of elbows and knees twitching beneath a shirt and trousers. It was quiet again. I stood back up and went to the room he’d just emerged from and switched on the light. An enormous teenager was crouching on the floor. When he saw me he began to hop on all fours around the room, breathing heavily.
“Who are you?” I shout, clutching at the door frame in uncertainty. My gaze drifts down from his oiled forehead and into the blistering, violent red eyes of madness. Rabid like, he hopped around the room for a while until he finally stopped by the wall opposite me. He slowly began to stand, the breathing getting louder. He was trembling. I closed the door quietly and looked around for something to block him in. Even through the door now I could hear his breathing. Is he talking? I pull across a bureau and set it to rest before leaving the room.

In the next room I meet a middle-aged man dressed in a lab coat over his corduroys. He looks up from his clipboard as I enter.
“Hello. I’m here to talk about your discovery Dr. Douglas.” I said.
“Oh hello, it’s nice to meet you. Did you find us okay?” He said, we shake hands.
“Of course. This place isn’t on any map but your directions were excellent. And how could I miss the opportunity to talk about such a fascinating discovery? Potentially one that could alter the context of civilization.” I say, taking out my tape recorder to record such a dramatic statement.
“Well, you tell me, haha.” He says. “Please, follow me to the control centre.”

The control centre was the entire second floor of the house knocked through to reveal a state of the art laboratory mixed with a state of the art security system, all decorated with state of the art meme paintings. HD monitors were fastened to poseable telescopic arms that descended from the ceiling. In the centre of the room was an enormous white table. Dr. Douglas went over to it and smudged his finger, unlocking the huge touch screen computer.
“What I have to show you may alter the future of human history…forever.” He says. He looked back down at the screen and opened up a menu bar and selected a folder, then a subfolder, then a file.
“Say hello to Toxoplasma gondii, a sporozoite that is capable of infecting more or less all warm-blooded mammals, although only breeding inside a feline. Immediately it appears to cause flu-like symptoms, although my research shows that there may be a slightly more insidious side to this microscopic creature.” Says Dr. Douglas. On the table there is a magnified video of the parasites making their way through space.
“Damn.” I say, slowly standing up after leaning against a desk.
“Damn is putting it lightly. Gondii has a 50% infection rate against feline to sapien interaction. We’ve found the average person has a twenty to one chance of carrying the disease.” Says a woman who’d just walked in.
“And you are?” I say, raising one of my eyebrows.
“Her name is Dr. Douglas. This is my daughter, Dr. Amanda Douglas.”
“A pleasure to meet you…doctor.” I say, raising my other eyebrow.
“As I was saying, Gondii is so prevalent in our society we ran studies on the actual effects of this parasite in humans beyond the immediate symptoms.”
“And?”
“And we’ve found that the parasite can affect human behaviour. It increases dopamine levels, shrinks grey matter and engorges the mendula oblongata.” She says sternly.
“In English?”
“Basically it alters the parts of the brain that effect behaviour. Fear, rationality, reasoning…it can even go on to alter sexuality. People with the infection are more likely to drink, more likely to swear…even more likely to have sex with each other.”
“Whoa whoa whoa, now you got my attention.” I say, holding my fingers up to my head and pretending as if my mind was exploding.
“For instance, once Gondii has infected a man it lays its eggs in his semen, which can they go on to infect a foetus before travelling up the mothers spinal column. It also has the added effect of increasing the sex drive of people with the parasite, who then go on to spread it further and further through…intercourse.” Says Dr. Douglas.
“Does that word make you…uncomfortable?” I say, smirking slightly as I create a steeple shape with my hands.
“I’m not sure if you’re taking this seriously.”
“Seriously? Seriously. You know, let me tell you about serious. I once knew a guy who’d worked all his life selling apples out of a cart, he had his own orchard that had been passed down through the generations but this guy had no kids. One day his horse dies and he has to start dragging the cart from his orchard all the way into town by himself, it’s not long before he takes a slip and breaks his ankle. A local kid comes up and finds him, puts him in the back of the cart and then drags both the old man and the apples all the way in to town to the local doctor. And you know what happened when he got there? The old man had died with a smile on his face and an apple core in his hand.” I said. Everyone was quiet for a moment.
“What happened to that kid?”
“His name was Steve Jobs, maybe you heard of him?”
“Even if Steve Jobs were here, he wouldn’t be able to do anything. Gondii makes people take more risks, become more narcissistic and more sexually active.”
“Sounds like the right ingredients for an Instagram superstar.”
“Not only is it transferable through bodily fluids, it is zoonotic. You can get it from eating rare steak for example. It’s potential for infection is enormous.”
“So what? Sounds like this Gondii is a good deal.”
“Cats.”
“Excuse me?”
“The parasite only breeds in cats. Mice that have Toxoplasmosis show almost no fear of cats. People who carriers on the other hand tend to have pet cats. I’ve been tracking the number of times cats are mentioned on the internet and the numbers are increasing at an exponential rate. Our society is becoming almost wholly obsessed with this animal.” Said Dr. Douglas.
“The cats themselves are benign. It’s the parasite that is the driving force behind this. Like Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the fungus that infects ants that alters their behaviour, Toxoplasma Gondii offers just as much a threat to humans. Our entire planet could become slaves to cats before the century is up.”
“So what you’re saying is we should destroy all cats?”
“It is difficult to think of how to deal with the disease. On the one hand it offers relatively little danger and in fact can make the host happier to some extent. On the other hand, the parasite could change over time…evolve to alter human behaviour further. The rabies virus makes the host attack others orally when it wants to propagate, what if a mutation of this virus makes people engage in…intercourse?”
“Does that word make you uncomfortable doctor?”
“Nevermind that. This little enclave is our test centre. We can run simulations, modify the parasites DNA and test its possibilities. We’ve already discovered that this parasite can cause schizophrenia in babies. You ever seen a schizophrenic baby?”
“So everyone living here is infected with brain parasites? Whose idea was this?”
“Mine.”
“Doctor…do you have Toxoplasma Gondii?” I ask.
“Of course. I accidentally caught it off my cats.” Says Dr. Douglas. He walks over to a cupboard and opens it up. Inside it is stuffed with cats. Hundreds of cats squashed together, mewling and hissing, a wall of fur and claws. The surface tension breaks and the room is suddenly filled with cats running across every surface. I start to run. Out in the next room the teenager has started hopping again, although he is set upon by cats. I knock over a table on my way out of the door and back onto the street. And I am greeted by a sea of cats eyes.

Hundreds of cats. Perhaps thousands. Some are sleeping, some clean themselves, others join flowing roads of cats that move this way and that. A few have already noticed me and are already rubbing themselves around my legs.
“Remove yourself!” I shout, beginning to run around the house. There is a couple copulating in the back garden, the low winter sun illuminating a pair of hairy buttocks rising and falling in the air as steam comes off the sweating bodies. I pull myself up over a garden fence and into the next one. A few people are gathered around a dead cat, they look up from their meal at me at the same time. All of them are wearing white contact lenses.
“Can I get a doggy bag?!” I wisecrack as I leap in with a karate kick, delivering the blow in slow motion to the forehead of an old man. Not breaking stride I continue to run, jumping, rolling, moving. Behind me thousands of cats are chasing over each other to get me, the microscopic worms in their brains wanting to enter mine. I run.

Movie Review: Interstellar Overdrive

Space. The final frontier. Space is futuristic, no matter what the context. The eventual penultimate sequel of any series of horror film must end in space. Cheech and Chong went to space, Brian Blessed went to space, Michael Fassbender went to space, the potential future of humanity is seen to be in space. And it is with this sort of nostalgia for the future that the film Interstellar plays upon over the 190 million dollar blockbuster directed by Christopher Nolan out in cinemas...Now!

The film starts with actor Mathew Mahoney working as an uneducated farmer in New York city before catching a zip-line ride into a secret underground base and blasted in a rocket through the universe! The film pays homage to many classics of the sci-fi genre. Flight of the Navigator, The Last Starfighter, Man of Steel and 2001: Abe's Odyssey are just a few of the movies Interstellar 'parodies' for extensive lengths of its 120 minute running time. Mathew Majonnahugh literally weeps throughout the entire film as he battles ice beasts, alien planets and even Father Time himself as he goes on a quest to find the true power of love. I think the swashbuckling nature of the main characters in the film add to its charm. For instance, MacConeys crash lands his spaceship on an alien planet and stands in the water, leaning back slightly so that his six pack really pops in the light thrown from the binary star system overhead. He looks around at the horizon and his mouth slowly drops open, the cigar he was smoking falls to the floor.
"Those aren't mountains." he says, taking off his sunglasses that had reflected the tsunami approaching him to reveal the steely cool gaze of M.M. He runs back to his ship and clambers on top of it. "Here goes nothing." he mutters to himself, as the wave begins to hit him. The entire screen is filled with a wave and suddenly we see the star riding the spaceship like a surfboard. A Hans Zimmer soundtrack of surf guitars and organ music is so loud it literally rips the cinema screen to shreds and blasts the entire audiences heads back simultaneously. Another classy moment is when Mathew McConnaghey is playing bass guitar in his space pod, lazily rolling around and around as he plays a version of 'Space Oddity', letting the CGI hair and beard float around in the zero gravity. Space is shown as not being a glamorous place for super scientists, but a sort of hyper-industrial working class structure in which humans are disposable, which makes it glamorous again.

Nolan does it again with another terrific film that is so contemporary it will be looked back on as being a classic 10's action flick. Maybe you will understand Inception more after getting into the mad mind brain of Nolan. Film critics in the future will often talk about it fondly, just as we look back on Barbarella or Event Horizon. Scanning any nerds film collection one is bound to see either no science fiction or almost be entirely science fiction, because science fiction is the language of the future. You can barely walk anywhere now without seeing a Star Trek quote etched into a boulder or teenagers discussing The Prisoner on street corners as they share electronic cigarettes. By 2019 the world will be entering a time so futuristic it will resemble that of Blade Runner! Interstellar is less about humanity's literal place in the universe than it is a celebration of how much fiction influences civilization, it doesn't pretend to be real for one moment. If you move your head from side to side whilst watching you will see how the entire universe exists on a two dimensional shape. Most of the people in the film are even played by well known actors and actresses. How am I supposed to believe that the head of NASA is a scientist when I know that he is in fact Michael Caine, famous actor? Everyone in the film are stood around in clothes they don't own in a fake room saying things that somebody else thought.

One thing to take away from this film is its technological optimism in the face of democracy. People are dumb is the main message of the film, yet delivered in a audience driven market of Dumb and Dumber To and Nativity 3: Dude Where's My Reindeer it will be interesting to see how this sci-fi blancmange blemishes against the eye, blossoming the blood vessels around the iris like exploding planets around the films eponymous black hole; Megadrive. Regardless I will give the film 8 stars out of 10, go and see it, tell your friends about it, tweet about it. #seenit

The Wayne Factor

In the beginning of the 20th century Sigmund Freud proposed a theory in which a man would subconsciously want to kill his father and have sex with his mother. This was called the Oedipus Complex, named after the famous myth of Oedipus Rex, and was a cornerstone of psychoanalysis and, in turn, a building block that makes up contemporary society as informed through pop culture. I believe that we have entered a new paradigm, that in which a man wants to both be Batman whilst having his father as Batman. This is called the Wayne Factor.

The Wayne Factor is a more concentrated idea of Freud’s in that it examines the particular personalities of people who divulge in media starring Batman. It is estimated roughly 95% of the American population know who Batman is. Unlike Jesus or even Father Christmas, Batman transcends cultural and theological borders. Part of Batman’s success is in his name. Without even seeing him, you can image a man that is, at least in some way, like a bat and it is this whimsical image that makes him well known. With billions spent on superhero films every year, Batman is perhaps the most popular with Joe Q. Public who prefers his humanity moreso than that of the Ubermensch from Krypton, Superman. Iron Man and Captain America are both human and therefore popular, and so far it appears as though the superhero films contain relatively little superpowers when compared to their comic book counterparts. Instead they are films about men struggling for identity and deciding on becoming a hero, and exploring that theme ad nauseum. Yet who can really say they identify with either being a hero or wanting to be heroic? It is less the concept of what heroism means to the modern man than it is that these heroes can be idolised as potential saviours for those that need it. This anxiety stems from wanting to be rescued by one of your parents as a child and them failing you, which is one of the first steps in separating the concept of a parent from the person that is your parent. The conceptual parent then becomes an idol in which faith is applied to, which is common in religious people. I suspect religion itself came about due to the strong biological link between parent and child brought about by the helplessness of newborns compared to that of almost every other animal on the planet. In the life of an adult a child is a novelty, although to a child the parent is godlike. If a parent should fail their child, the child will then seek a new figure. For thousands of years this desire was manifest in a pantheon of gods. Now it has become Batman.

Consider Batman. Upon the death of both parents, billionaire Bruce Wayne trains all of his life and dons an animimal costume in order to fight criminals from a working class background. It is the costume itself that makes Batman who he is. This costume or ‘bat-persona’ is in order to mask the true identity of the wearer and so, by becoming anonymous, allows the potential in which Batman could be anyone. Fans of Batman often like to imagine themselves as Batman, perched on a tall building dressed in a cape, their muscular bodies protected against the battering rain by a second skin of body armour. At the same time they may imagine themselves victims of crimes and Batman arrives to save them. In the phantasy of the films this is Batman’s most useful skill, his ability to save people and in doing so he becomes a paragon of masculinity. If we consider a few attributes that we would consider masculine, such as physical strength, emotional resilience, fecundity and so on we can also see that these are attributes desirable for a father. It is the parental attributes of Batman that people probably find most appealing, hence his popularity amongst those who have difficult relationships with their own fathers. They love nothing more than settling into a folding-down seat with a box of popcorn, watching Batman loom over them in glorious 3D for hours at a time, trying to ignore the desperate need to be loved by an older man.

This brings us to the psychosexual elements of Batman. It is a common idea that Batman is a gay man, having sex with Robin at regular intervals in the batcave. Why not? I feel as though the idea of Batman being gay is so intrinsically tied to the metanarrative of Batman that this leads to a simple conclusion. The Wayne Factor of a person shows their inclination to desire sexual intercourse with their father whilst also being their own father, in order to have sexual intercourse with their mother. Also that during these acts, both parents are dead. The incestuous love triangle is complete and in the centre is Batman,
slowly rotating,
face hidden in the shadows,
his body pulses.

Horror Of Creek Mansion

It was a dark and stormy night when I arrived at Creek Mansion. The rain came down heavy on the car windscreen, the wipers sliced sights upward of the house I was to stay in that night. The billion dollar home stuffed with the latest technology was built on top of a hill overlooking the Yorkshire dales, isolated from the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life. Yet as I got out of the car and walked through the rain, I couldn't help but miss certain amenities living in a city offered. Strange things happened in the countryside. Things not reported on mainstream news, things that bore no witness. I took an envelope out of my pocket and ripped the top open. A plastic key-card lay in the cleft of the paper, I took it out and examined the design on the card. Every large electronics company had a secret division working on experimental prototypes, theoretical products that the public wouldn't necessarily yet want but was worth preparing for. The house I entered was part of one such programme, the Home of the Future. And I was to stay one night there.

The lights came on as I entered the front door, giving me my first glimpse inside. A sweeping marble staircase ran along one wall, drawing the eye to the elaborate plaster covings all around the ceiling, lit in a thousand reflections cast from a chandelier. Several corridors went off in various directions, the dark wooden floors leading off into the shadows. I removed my coat and placed it on a hat-stand by the door.
"Hello?" I called out. "Is there anyone there?"
There was no response. I walked across the huge Persian rug and through a hallway in front of me. I notice small black orbs in the ceiling. Cameras watched me. I pick the door nearest to me and turn the handle.
"Hello?" I say. Each wall switches on, bathing everything in a soft glow. A window unfolds and gives me a view of outside along with a large clock. Small projectors are stood at the foot of each of the huge, white walls. The only furniture in the room is a large red leather chair, a side-table and a bottle of red wine. A rotating circle appears on one wall dotted with symbols. I look away but find that the circle follows me. As if it is shining out of my eyes. A lot of the icons are similar to the ones I had on my phone, although there were just as many I didn't recognise. The minimalist designs were hard to decode, somewhere between hieroglyphics and Hangul. I reached out towards one.
~Welcome.~
"Hello. Can you hear me?"
~Yes.~
"Who are you?"
~i am the house computer.~ flashed the text. That made sense, in the future even computers would live in houses.
"I'm staying here tonight. Where can I put my bags?" I said, looking back towards the door. The lights had gone off outside.
~in your room.~
"And where is that?" With this, a 3D map appeared on one wall, showing a flashing red dot in a room upstairs.

The house was entirely silent as I made my way up the stairs and along the first floor mezzanine. A door at the end of the hallway was open. Things were moving. The walls seemed to bleed light across my vision like jets of ectoplasm, causing me to blink and jerk my head at the disturbance. I entered the room I was staying in, looking out of the window. Tree branches whipped backward and forward in the wind like waves of insect legs. I took out my dictaphone to call myself in the future. "I have arrived at the home of the future. There's a sort of crackling noise. It also doesn't smell of anything." I note.

I began to pace the corridors of the house, bursting my way into the various empty rooms lit by energy saving lightbulbs. The whole house appeared dim and almost sepia toned, the colours dripping in on themselves as I made my way round the maze like structure around me before arriving back at the main foyer. I was alone, yet knew that the internet of things made this a veritable wasps nest of wi-fi activity. The walls were thinking. I was inside a computer, an electric brain. I saw a silhouette in the darkness, which gave me pause. I watched at it dissolved in a cascade of entopic cells. Was my mind rotting or had I just seen a ghost? And in so seeing a ghost proving to myself that there was an afterlife, in which case I should spend as much time as possible with the ghosts in order to see what they're like? Why is it they spook people? Can't we work together in a metempsychotic utopia? I went back into the room with the chair and poured myself a glass of red wine.
"Computer...have you ever seen a ghost?" I ask.
~No.~
"Show me videos of actual ghosts on youtube, please." Against one corner several squares were clustered, each showing a silent video of ghost sightings. I raised my arm in the arm and selected several of the videos before flicking them out across the walls.
"Maximise." I said, pointing at one clip and throwing it to the centre of my view. It was of an empty room at night. Using a mixture of sign language and hand miming I paused the video, unrolled it like a piece of film and cut out a specific section towards the end in which a mysterious figure appears beneath the duvet. I mime using a magnifying glass.
"Where are you?" I scanned each frame individually before stopping. I could see an evil face peeking out from the side of the bed nearest the wall. Proof of paranormal activity.
"Computer, e-mail this to all of the newspapers with the title; Proof of ghouls. FAO Editor." I said, drinking the fortified wine. And so this went on for several hours, the wine bottle becoming emptier, my clothing being shed gradually so that I emerged from the cotton cocoon into full nudity. If I should be attacked by any being, actual or imaginary, it was best to be like Beowulf.

After a time I decided to go into the kitchen to make myself a midnight snack of booze.
"Kitchen, do we have any fruits?" I ask. The fridge lights up to show a video of the inside of the fridge. It is empty.
~Would you like me to order some food?~ came a voice.
"Sure. Order me a variety of fruit please." I say. A phone sprouts small wheels and drives itself towards me, flips itself over and shows the number for a local fruit delivery guy. Twelve pieces of fruit for ten hard earned bitcoins, what could go wrong? I picked up the phone and began to dial when a strange goo began to pour out of the receiver.
"That's strange." I remarked to myself. A sinister giggle happened behind me, causing me to turn. Nothing there. When I looked back at the phone in my hand I could see it had turned into a humanoid figure made out of an orange. I began to peel but dropped it when it began to bleed. The orange-man began to crawl away from me but I took the piece of peel and ripped it back, revealing an inner skeleton and nervous system made from pith.
"Kitchen, what's that supposed to be?" I said, picking up the orange-man.
~I tried to print you an orange using nearby matter.~
"What's this then?"
~50% man, 50% orange.~ came the metallic response.
"Where did you find the orange?" I asked. No sooner had I said it an orange bumped against my foot. It must have rolled across the floor towards me from beneath one of the cupboards. I knelt down on the cold floor and peered in the shadows.
"Do you have any grapes?" I asked. I could see for a moment the grinning face of a corpse, it opened its eyes and slime began to pour out. I reached under the cabinet for it and yanked it out by the neck, it had the consistency of wet cobwebs.
"Beware...beware..." it murmured, voice sounding as though it was gargling soup. I'd seen a few ghosts in my time, but never any ones that gave me fruit.
"What's the big deal? Where did you get that orange from?" I asked, laying the dead thing by the sink and washing some of the mud off it in the sink.
"Don't...don't go into the cellar..." it whispered.
"Why?"
"You'll die..." it whispered. I laughed at it, picking it up again and putting it in the fridge.
"I think you need to chill out ghost. What if I'm already dead? I should get to the bottom of this mystery."

I walked down the hall, knocking on the wall as I went. I'd found it, a hollow sound. There was a door that had been boarded up, probably when the computer systems had been integrated into the house. After looking around for a bit I found a knife and began to stab at the wall.
~What are you doing?~ said the computer from the observation room.
"Looking for ghosts or something."
~You shouldn't go down there.~
"Yes." I said. I kept stabbing and slashing at the wall until I'd made a hole big enough for my arm, I reached in and began to tear the panels back.
~Stop.~
"What will you do if I don't?" I said. There was no response. Suddenly all the lights went off. I could tell the air conditioning was a bit cold.
~I'll undo all your reviews on Netflix.~ said the computer.
"Do it. I keep a paper version anyway. Analogue, baby." I said, turning around and smiling over my shoulder at one of the ceiling cameras. With a final push I managed to make a hole just big enough for my body to fit through. The steps leading down to the cellar were cold against my feet. If I put my hand out in front of me I couldn't see anything.
"Hello? Is there anybody down here?" I shouted. After fumbling my way through the darkness for a while I finally found a lightswitch and flicked it on. Blinking in the abject brightness momentarily I then saw something that made me stop. My eyes were afixed to it.
"Oh..." I said quietly. My hand went back to the light switch and turned it off and I began to walk back upstairs, the hair on my neck standing up. I sat back in the silent observation room eating an orange. I hadn't blinked for hours, simply staring off into the distance. The thing in the cellar had etched itself onto my very soul. A horror.

Oxford Road Regeneration

The regeneration of the Oxford Road roadside architecture via construction sponsored by Americans is a modern day retelling of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Or is it? Facsimile mall fronts boast a potential future of the BBC car park, the cornerhouse and the over-street covered arcade, a third quarter perspective three dimensional building plans are juxtaposed with photographs of people laughing together. South Oxford road as a mindscape, a lived out dream for the Yuppy flying north for the winter.

“This £300m scheme will bring business into the area. There’s a mile long stretch from the universities to Whitworth park that is an underdeveloped retail zone, offering a –3% drop to the cities potential gold reserves. There’ll be gyms and a nando’s and cat themed bakeries and a Boots. All of it made of glass and steel done in the style of Joseph Paxton. But smart tech enabled. Pedestrians can choose to have their favourite music play as they walk in order to give a televisual sense of scope in their lives, remembering years as a montage accompanied by Florence And The Machine or Kitchen Jumper. Instead of the selfie they’ll be the actualfie, people will actually see other people with a hologram shone under their face, makeup made of light. Driverless cars will potter along the smart road on duvet wheels, it’s occupants talking to artificial intelligences through their glasses about gopro pro-sport statistics.” Said Alphonse Masters, lead designer on the project. He was giving a press conference in front of the cornerhouse, addressing a crowd of ten.
“This is our heritage!” someone shouted, thin body tucked deep into a waterproof jacket. He had that hair.
“The visual concept of Manchester is unimportant. London has Big Ben, New York has the Statue of Liberty, Manchester has The Stone Roses. And rain. Sometimes it might feel like the world is ending, and that’s because it is. Constantly ending and beginning, a reality shaped onion with as many layers as moments in time constantly growing into infinite. There is the potential that we can extend human lifespans far beyond our current frame of mortality. Five or ten times a lifetime today. What would one do after experiencing everything, becoming a master at every subject, to have done everything? Perhaps mutate into a piece of intelligent art positioned in the wilderness, thinking thoughts for eternity. We have several such pieces being commissioned already, conceptual art pieces in which a consciousness could exist in post-biology. The Venus De Milo could have a supercomputer fitted that predicts weather patterns. Every work in the Tate could be animated by holograms and answer questions from the visitors.” said Alphonse.
“What is the point in all this.” Somebody else called out.
“I…It’s the gateway to the knowledge capital.
Improved public community zone realms
Leisure Strategy, including 1000 new jobs.” He said, tanning in adolescent rage. A bolt of lightning zipped through the air and into his eye. On an MRI machine you would see his body turn into light. Around the corner turns a Finglands bus, the last artifact of the 20th century drives away towards Rusholme never to be seen again.

This place of opportunity

and enterprise, of love and

laughter, of culture and

community, of knowledge

and invention.

This place.

This powerful partnership.

This theatre of ambition.

Robin Williams Makes Us Think

I'd been thinking about the time in which I met Robin Williams. He had bitten through a SCART cable as he tried setting up a playstation 2. Is his destruction in his creativity? Let's even gaze at the possibility that his death is remarkable. We live in a celebrity world where I question the motives of people I've never met. In hindsight, we could muster the cheeky little thought that suicide is unreasonable. Perhaps even ironic. But this brings up a question in which how society perceives death.

The new death aesthetic is part of a social regime in order to make people comfortable with death and therefore fearless. What better freedom than being able to choose when you die and for it to be accepted by your friends and family? Perhaps they would cheer you on as you went through a bottle of paracetamol or laugh at you as you kicked in the noose. But this isn't part of the society we yet live in. Death is talked about in hushed tones in dark rooms. It is a secret. Imagine yourself on your death bed in the far future. Somebody holds up an old photograph of a baby. It is you.

Are You There Margaret? It's Me, God

Although over 50% of British people say that they are Christian, over 50% of the population isn't sat in church on a Sunday morn singing hossana before shaking hands with the vicar by the vestibule. Saturday echoes in memory, the vicar is more akin to a large iphone playing a religion app on his data nexus ie his human brain. I attended a church grounds the other day, and amidst the gravestones and broken branches I discovered a half empty bottle of beer. Is this the kind of respect we pay to the institution of a god?

It is the post modern view that God is dead. Excess leisure time has allowed us to have teenagers and in doing so, fostered rebellion against authority which in turn causes an opposition to that which appears to dominate before becoming that dominating factor in the lives of their children. It turns out the Christians were right when they believed Elvis was the antichrist, although as they were stuck using the logic and language of Christianity rather than post-modernism their message appeared laughable. But yesterdays joke becomes tomorrows news.

There is a segment in the consciousness that fits a sort of God-shaped jigsaw piece. Many people will turn to spirituality, money, exercise, drugs and so on in order to fill this piece, yet a horse is not a car. It is only the all powerful Jehovah that can occupy this space as he is the one true God. Alongside Buddha and the holy lord Ganesh, the fatal trinity occupies the pyramid of heaven. A lot of hipsters nowadays think that God doesn't exist, because it makes them seem cool and edgy. The concept of an all powerful being that created everything before time existed is metal as fuck and therefore seems pretty 'cool' to me.,

There is a lot of cynicism in our society and this is due to our pop culture. You want to watch Bruce Willis shoot John Travolta with a machine gun over and over again, laughing as popcorn and goo drips from your mouth? Don't listen to them, they are full of shit. You can conquer all enemies and realise all the night visions and should. The ones who author pop culture are white Americans with a chip on their shoulder and their heart on their sleeve and a quill in the hand; that's why they are writers in the first place. Nihilism is the philosophical equivalent to a hollow egg. An egg should form more eggs, that is its eggness. If you are a true nihilist you should wait til winter, set a bath and sit in it, awaiting your death cocoon to become around you as you smile smugly at a godless universe.

Where is God? We need him now more than ever. Or do we? Perhaps not. Or maybe we do? Or perhaps we don't. Also it might be possible he's already here. Or maybe not. Who knows for sure? Maybe someone does.

None of it is real and therefore we should tell all children that father Christmas isn't real either and cancer patients that they will die. It is better to grasp onto the little hanging skin of reality which we have left in the face of cyber present. Convert churches into server stacks. New religion in which every member is Jesus. Vatican City can become a theme park. Baroque spaceships that transport a hologram that thinks it's God. The religion of the dolphins. Systems of belief. Modern day Bethlehem. Fiction affecting fact so that the fiction is fact. "I believe in...something." A mahogany statue of Jesus crying tears of blood donated by the parish. A factory that makes sacramental breads. Flim flam men.

"It further cements in my mind over the years that God isn't dead and I was wrong all along. And dumb." - Hermann Nietzsche, 1927

Mobius Party

I had been at the world’s longest running party for four hours and was beginning to feel sluggish. The bubbly acid yiddish funk thumped in the speakers as an M.C. ironically scratched the records and made a podcast. The party had been continuing since the first of January in the year two thousand. Fourteen years of non-stop nonsense. The host, Gary Faberge, sits on a smashed in couch trying to separate cigarette papers from each other.
“How can you afford this?” I ask. Gary gently peels a paper away and straightens it with his thumb and forefinger.
“I’m sponsored by Red Bull. Can’t you see the signage?” he says, nodding around at the huge company logos stuck on each wall. There were also thousands of empty red bull cans dotted throughout the building like spent ammunition, along with empty nitrogen canisters and bottle lids. The walls are patterned with graffiti, chemical frescoes. The guests stagger around like somnambulists, mumbling to each other about green energy and the illuminati. At least three people had to be awake and music playing at all times for it to be classed as a party, although that was simple enough that the party had been going on for a while.
“How did it start?”
“Well, in 1999 I had a big New Year’s Eve party, it were mad. I had fifty people in my flat, this were before we knocked through, so it were packed. People kept coming and going at all hours and that’s been pretty much it ever since.”
“What’s it been like to have been living in a perpetual party?” I ask, watching a cockroach make its few last steps before dying of old age. Gary roots around amongst the empty cans until finding a pouch of tobacco and sprinkling it along the fold of the paper before rolling it up.
“None stop parties forever!” shouts a girl, her makeup mostly snot and cocaine.
“Sometimes it has been hell. Sometimes it has been good. But it’s always been a party.”
“Doesn’t every party have to end sometime?”
“I don’t see this ending any time soon. I’m having an extension built on the roof, it’s going to be a big magnet that will turn the entire house into a speaker.” Says Gary, lighting up the cigarette wearily. “What is most remarkable is that I have survived my own life. I had my first cigarette when I was nine, took pills before I left high school and had a crack addiction for the last twenty years. And I can’t leave this party.”
“Why?”
“I…I don’t know how.” He says, looking into the distance. We are interrupted again by a spokesman from Red Bull wearing a silver suit, honking an air horn all around us.
“Do you guys like to party?! Can I get a hell yeah!” he shouts. I take out a can of expanding foam and spray it into his mouth before turning back to Gary.
“I can get you out of here. We can escape.” I whisper. Gary looks at me with the eyes of an abused dog. Too scared to act. An untenable position. I don’t need to hear his reply, he was always at the party and will never leave. The party and the man have become inseparable, the lines between the two have become blurred. To stop one would mean to stop the other, just as sometimes when an elderly person dies their partner does soon after. The redbull spokesman has managed to pull most of the expanding foam from out of his maw and so I refill it for him before making my way downstairs, past fire damaged walls and across urine soaked carpets. The amount of cigarette burns everywhere are reminiscent of the surface of the dark side of the moon, black on black on black. I descend into the depths of the party, copulating couples and people caught in an overdose. True debauchery, akin to that of any civilization tipping over the edge, just as different species of animal would begin to fuck and eat each other just before an earthquake struck. Unrestricted pleasure often resembled pain, just as every opposite is more alike than the state in between.

Constructing Wave Function

The beginning of the universe began with the Big Spread. All the matter in the universe was at its most furthest point away from all other things, even at an atomic level. Due to the potential energy that could be created by imploding, everything began to clump together. From the black holes spew light that gently spread outwards, allowing glimpses of the distant future like a drop of ink in water. Clouds in space begin to appear, gradually growing brighter over millions of years as they begin to gather together before suddenly appearing as a sphere. The giant blue and red stars cover the night sky like pearls on black velvet. Some of these shrink, revealing hot desert planets, inhospitable to all life. From the Big Spread, things began to come together. Moons, asteroids, planets, stars. The galaxies begin to form, beginning a whirlwind dance that will last for billions of years. On some planets life begins to emerge, forming itself in the air from the dust, ancient corpses begin to slowly grow across entire planets. And from death, comes life.

The history of humanity has been a long and arduous one, but look how far we have come. From various strands in the galaxy our species begin to descend back towards our solar system, although progress is much slower now than it ever was then. The simplification of technology has been going on for thousands of years and is only just beginning to show signs of slowing down. It’s thought by the year 2000 we won’t have the internet.

The way in which we have lead our lives hasn’t changed much. Some of us begin our lives in a care home and go on to collect a pension for a number of years. Our partners are some of the first to come back from the dead, maybe our parents a couple of decades later. We get to know our children better, watching them grow older and older until they are unborn back from where all of life ends. We ourselves gradually grow older, starting in jobs with a lot of responsibility and making our way up the career ladder to a position with little to no responsibility. A few of us are rolled out of the crematorium much older, our bodies reforming from the very air around us and within a couple of days awaken in hospitals and emergency rooms, driven by ambulances to terrific accidents that revert the body back to health.

It is thought by some that the universe will end in a Big Crunch, following the concept of entropy: All systems will evolve into order. All matter in the universe will become warmer and nearer together, this process accelerating until all matter in the universe collapses into a single point. What happens after this? Nobody knows. There is no time after this moment. Everything is as it should be, in its most basic and simplistic form that would take up the same space as a coconut or perhaps a melon. Scientists have hypothesised that following this huge implosion that there will be an explosion; all of matter will shoot outward again. Maybe time itself would reverse. Although consciousness exists in a strange dimension outside of space and time, you only have to look from one star to another to see that you can (theoretically) move great distances without following the laws of nature. Who knows what the inhabitants of this theoretical universe may experience?

Le Tour Yorkshire 2014

Is the Tour De France a Tour De Farce? - Conceptually, the great bicycle race symbolises a sort of sped-up re-enactment of the history of France. At the back of the race are the peasants riding on rusted hulks of metal and dirt, ill from drink. The aristocrats are next, wearing large powdered wigs that wobble and breathe as they ride through the Yorkshire dales, speeding past advertisements for sports drinks and signs made by school children. A helicopter flies above the high speed congestion, beaming video images down to the crowd of the crowd watching itself. There is a special bike for the Napoleon impersonator, it is especially motorised and has fat tyres and smells like bowling balls. The impersonator rides, shouting obscene things at the crowd in 18th century French as a man riding a guillotine continually circles him. There is a special ramp on the course that the Napoleon impersonator will ride off and into an Oxbow lake. Shortly after that the road is covered in burritos that offer a fun little hazard until they continue riding around Yorkshire.

It could be that things aren't so literal, but allow me to say without a shadow of a doubt, this is one of the best bike races ever.

12 Things that Make Tour De France Awesome

1. You'll Never Guess What Happens Next When Grandma Goes For A Bike Ride.
2. Actors From Television Had The Best Time At Tour De France In Yorkshire
3. 27 Things That Make Yorkshire Great
4. Girl Totally NAILS It With Impromptu Dancing At Tour De France In Yorkshire
5. The Best Looking Girls...And Guys At Tour De France In Yorkshire
6. This Guy Thought He Just Won A Medal. You Won't Believe What Happens Next...
7. 27 Photos Of Twee Fuckers
8. Born In The Last 20 years? This Article Is 4 U Dawg
9. 38 Problems Only People With Bulging Eyeballs Will Understand
10. 10 Awesome Costumes Parents Have Made Their Kids Wear For The Internet
11. Weird Ghost Haunting Girl Turns Out To Be Stranger
12. Information Conformity Through Intellectual Doubt

Is there anything more lazier than watching sport? Hebden Bridge was a chaos of plastic, burning giant bongs packed with salvia and staggering into riders pushing themselves up tarmac, the slices where the glaciers had been robbed them of cartilage. They follow the same roads that Peter Sutcliffe had learned to drive. Yet Yorkshire has changed since those days, why not check out the website and discover a new world, your world, your yorkshire. Have a brilliant Yorkshire. Sometimes called 'The Jewel Of Yorkshire', Halifax is considered one of the most romantic areas in the North of England. Explore your shire. Situated between the sea and Lancashire, have a nice Yorkshire.

Bicycle race.

Movie Review: Kick Ass 2

Remember the summer of ’10? Pop Idol was in the charts, the prince of England got married and Kick Ass was the surprise summer smash-hit blockbuster superhero film the post-modern public wanted to see. The film followed the story of Ashley Kibultz, a nerd who gets injured in a fist fight against goons, granting him the power of nerve damage. He then goes onto meet Nicholas Cage and Hit Girl, a sassy mouthed feminist icon with quadruple the recognition of the girl from Leon and packing a mean arsenal! Of course a sequel was inevitable, and in 2013 we were lucky enough to have one grace the silver screen starring some of the original cast and some new faces (John Lugizimano, Jim Carrey) to deliver the action-packed fast talking hyper-violent continuation of the plot of the previous film. Now and then when a film is really good, the studio executives decide that they would like another version of the film told at a different time in the story in order to remove imagination from audiences. This is called a sequel, a prequel or now and then a parallequal. In this case the film picks up where the last one finished; Hit Girl is in high school and Ashley Kibultz is getting his ass handed to him on a daily basis. The events over the next two and half hours take a variety of twists and turns but trust me, the plot is relatively simple to follow and probably one you’ve seen before.

It is an important film not because of its quality, but because of its context. It is the quintessential film of the decade, combining references to modern technology that will become outdated within five years, a lazy kind of CSI: Miami cinematography and dialogue that makes me imagine the words on the page of a script and how somebody could bring themselves to write them down in the first place. The major themes of the film are of an Oedipal quality; there are no fathers. If there are, they die. If they resemble any kind of seniority combined with masculinity, they die. This sets the film in a Freudian tone and should be interpreted as such. There are many references to sex throughout the movie, although this is often done immaturely. Somebody is called a cock sucker rather than anybody actually sucking cock. It is strange to live in a society that accepts violence yet not sexuality. Pornographic parody films could be seen as coming from a dimension in which violence was switched with sex. Soldiers would have sex on the battlefield, superheroes would kiss each other repeatedly, there would be romantic films where people would threaten each other for an hour before one murders the other. If Kick Ass 2 was from this bizarro world, what would it resemble?

The film also places itself in a metanarrative about sequels and comic books with the subtlety of a hippopotamus shitting in your bath. It is as if the writers knew that the film was entirely ridden with cliché, although rather than offer an alternative they had characters simply turn slowly towards the camera with a smug smile on their faces, often saying phrases like ‘You’re spending your time watching this movie?’ or ‘If you’re having fun watching this you probably haven’t seen that many.’ And stuff like that. This can be quite a risk in the writing of a sequel as it depends on quality to make the joke amusing else the audience feel mildly insulted and maybe even disorientated. In real life do people run around shouting to each other how ‘this isn’t a film’? I have only ever heard that phrase spoken in films, especially Kick Ass 2.

Overall I'd have to give this movie a 76% 'fresh' rating. Maybe watch it in one minute intervals over the course of a month, this was the intended way to experience it.

Entering Deep Simulation

E-cigarettes
Social media
Body-building
Microwaves
Porn
Travelling
Video games
Make-up
Sport
Are all simulations of the intended act, made antiseptic and cyber. We are entering an apocalyptic society in which technology begins to invade not just our minds but our bodies. The world vibrates at a certain frequency as it tries to attain balance. The search for authenticity leads to a simulated version which becomes the subject rather than itself. A thing is reduced by being recorded, quantified, replicated. A video of a storm is not a storm, yet the person recording it was experiencing it behind a camera. What is in front of the camera becomes cinematic, there is a theatricality in the image. People nowadays walk around with a computer in front of them, ordering burgers to their pet dog whilst quitting work to go on a Call of Duty binge. I can shout to my phone and it sprouts small wheels and drives itself to me. In the film The Matrix it was thought denizens would be imprisoned in virtual reality pods with their butts hanging out. In the future reality will become more virtual, there will be no real world to escape to as technology will have replicated everything.

There is no imagination, just reference. Many critics throw this bone out once in a while, although they don’t understand that an Egyptian Pharaoh wouldn’t have been able to imagine being a heroin addict living in New York city. Therefore the original will always exist in the future. If time travel existed we could go into the future, copy some CD’s and bring them back. Can you guess what the number one song in the year 3589 is? Probably some grindcore.

In the video game the sims you play out the lives of actual human beings in abstract potentials. But whose to say all of this isn’t controlled by a mad robot? This questions the nature of reality and in doing so we realise it really is a moot point only the worst pragmatist would lazily bring up. The nature of reality itself is unimportant. Whether we are a brain in a jar, the dream of an elephant, the game of a god or any combination of the three. What scientists do know is that the skein of reality is malleable, similar to lava or perhaps magma. Through inventions like the internet or hypderdrives we can explore the alternate dimensions that exist on another planet. How about a world in which everything is legal? What about a world without poverty? Can you ever imagine that happening in this dimension bub?

To bring this essay to a close I’d like to share some thoughts with you.

Sand is like time, without nature involved we don’t know what to make of it.
Yonic symbolism is strongly lacking in our culture.
Think of life like a bubble floating in the air. When it pops aren’t we just one of the cosmos?
Quantum Physics has proved that we are watched by particles. Why?
There is an unbroken chain of parent and child that links you to a fish.
Magic is real…if you believe in yourself.
Sometimes there’s no such thing as coincidence. This is the uncertainty equation.
It’s fear that gives men wings.
If you sharpen a pencil until there is nothing left, is the shavings a pencil?

Beneath Its Wings

The Aesthetics of Fail Videos

Now so more than ever moments are caught on glass retinas, recorded, uploaded, observed. The culmination of this technology are short films in which people are injured then edited together into a ten minute compilation video titled 'Fails of the week'. Like 19th century optograms, the sight and sound of people losing control of their bodies is watched after the fact by hundreds of thousands of people, cheering and laughing in the near future. I find them to be of cultural value, the aesthetics of each video has a certain quality that is so far removed from reality and cinema it lends itself more to a dream.

Each snapshot is captured from the point of view of an observer, although occasionally the victim is holding the camera. The accidents vary in violence and banality, although most feature an urban setting, often involving human powered vehicles, such as roller skates, falling afoul of architecture and Newton's laws of motion. There is often a cosiness about the background, they are the places people go to have fun. American streets, ski-resorts, boats, sport days, the family home, out in nature. Each serve as the scene of a potentially lethal accident, through the lack of foresight in an individual or insane luck. The accidents themselves have a painlessness about them, even though the footage is caught in eye bleeding high definition the video cuts off soon after. We don't get to see the consequences of the acts. They are bloodless, there is little emotional response to the accident besides shock. We don't see the interior of hospitals where mothers sit in empty rooms drinking coffee, looking at the setting sun with faces dried by tears. Whilst watching this malarky we are jet around the world as it is today. The fashion technology people could be the same as the one's standing outside your door (waiting for you), although we are taken to such exotic locations as Russia or America. This is a version of the world away from news channels, as polished television drama, as documentary footage and so on. It is a window into a world that is normal to those in it, yet becomes increasingly alien as time goes on.

The viewers of these videos dub themselves 'The Fail Army', who scour the digital globe for the juiciest accidents and attacks for splicing. These vulgar nerds respond to accusations of sadism that what they are doing is slapstick and light-hearted, suggesting that for the video to be uploaded in the first place that there was an element of consent, an acknowledgement of survival. Not only is it amusing, it is inspiring how the human body reacts to falling down a flight of stairs or being hit by a tree whilst riding a motorbike. We are a durable species, it reminds us that the world isn't necessarily safe, yet that in itself can be overcome. Yet there is still an antiseptic nature to the videos. Though the event happened, the viewer is watching it remotely from the safety of a chair. The end result is still the simulation of violence rather than being in any actual risk. There is a sub-sect of 'The Fail Army' who call themselves 'The Pain Lords'. This group has a much more misanthropic view of the world. They spend hours collecting the screams of pain and making them into bizarre soundscapes they listen to in their sleep. They hang around accident black spots with night vision cameras, giggling to themselves as they wait for the next car containing a family to wrap itself round a tree. They watch snuff films on their phones as they ride public transport, not caring that the people around them are torn between curiosity and disgust. 'The Fail Army' is trying to distance itself from these sociopaths, yet they do have the best taste when it comes to selecting footage for the annual 'Fails of the Year' videos.

It is empathy that makes the videos worth watching. Is it more valuable to place yourself as the cameraman at a distance, or as the victim of the accident, imagining your vision spinning as your head tumbles over a fluctuating centre of gravity? To imagine the smack of concrete against an elbow or having a metal fence rammed between your legs brings out a more satisfying enjoyment of the videos. That way when the day comes in which you suffer a horrible accident, you will have already felt it a thousand times before. And maybe somebody will be filming you as it is happening.

Goodbye Thoughts

Some portraits done by students aged between 70-125 years old. Whilst drawing we can't help but subconsciously inserting some part of ourselves onto the paper. It is through placing ourselves inside the drawing that we can better understand the artist.

Underlying Theorem

The theory of everything is a theory of ideas. Matter and energy are unimportant, as are time and space. Mathematics are a way of understanding physics, yet what are mathematics without a mathematician? The universe was made believed to have existed whilst running parallel to every moment in time, carved over the aeons from future understandings of reality. It is only by through being believed in that a thing exists. For years scientists searched for the Higgs Boson, spending billions of euros to find the God particle. Is this any different from the fact that when Christians die that they go Christian heaven? Or that Buddhists are reincarnated as lobsters after not paying their taxes? In the centre of a black hole, where the forces of nature are so extreme they cease to make sense, is this an admittance that logical conclusions will eventually become illogical? What if you wore a hat with a brim so large it covered an entire city. If machines that can adapt were left on a planet long enough would evolve intelligence and ponder their existence~ would a video tape left playing long enough become sentient. If mankind ever was to reach the edge of the universe, could he begin to create new galaxies outside of everything? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.

Due to the saggy fabric of reality, all it takes for something to be true is for enough people to believe true. Science take place across the cosmos and involve the belief of aliens, so the rules remain simple. More locally the believed fictions tend to be more true. Werewolves once existed, so did Zeus. There is simply no other explanation. Why do we need science to explain things like telepathy when you and me know that it exists? We live in a fictional world striving for realism and falling to pieces when every million to one long-shot comes true. The weaknesses in order, the striving for chaos, the ringing from a bell tower that is yet to be built, lifting a stone to see the insects belief and dropping it down upon seeing them, the gradual realisation of your own aging, the squashy eyed moments of orgasm, two hammers pounding together, crystalline parallax, obnoxious rhododendron, that dreams are real and the real is a dream, time lapsed implosions of snails, the absurdity of being alive, the morning sun in summer, the continuum of ennui and staring off into the distance distracted by thoughts about the death of your partner. All of these fold like origami into a kind of lattice pork pie shape that's the time paradox revolution, if you extract the firmament using a simple Van Bolonvandervarian equation you can unlock the secrets of life. If not, you are rendered illegible for public recognition and dandelion seeds will be spread in your garden for six and six years.

Film Review: Elysium

The film opens up with a shot of a futuristic space world called Elysium. This is where half of the action takes place and contrasts the smelly trash world below; our plan et. This science fiction extravaganza is set in the future where medicine doesn't exist and questions the technicalities of obamacare, the one percent manoeuvre and robot cops. Directed by Stannis Beklev, director of the famous 'District 9' series, this second romp into the future weighs less on facts and more on wow factor. Matt Damon plays an idiot who works in a factory who one day gets microwaved along with a robot suit, the 2 fuse together to create a super soldier of the future. Jodie Foster meanwhile plays mild-mannered Elysium-class scientist and president Sarah Mildew, co-creator of Space Lab and the one in charge of the orbiting space platform. Matt Damon then races against time to get into space to fight her for ruining his life and hopefully crashing Elysium into the world, forever finishing money. I won't give away the end but I was shocked by the twist in the last few minutes, make sure to keep your eyes peeled as what you might think happen? It doesn't happen. And what actually does happen is so distant from the usual Hollywood tra-la-la that I'm going to give this movie 5 stars.



Now for the critical analysis. Lurking in the bowels of this film is a sophisticated argument against robots. In the future everyone who is good at anything is a robot. The police, the doctors and even the gardeners are all robots. As Matt Damon is transformed into a half and half, he undergoes a significant character arc that will be mirrored by the future; What exactly are we giving up when we're giving up our humanity? I think only a pragmatist would argue that old age is a good thing, everyone else would insist that everyone can live forever in robot bodies that grant us super intelligence and super strength, maybe other super abilities, but in this film especially the vague contraption that Matt Damon wears enhances him morally. At the start of the film he's nothing more than a lowly yokel working at a factory for free. He even robs a kid in the first few minutes of the film so he can get himself a future sludge butty. But as soon as his robot suit is enabled, he can run faster than a car and shoot his bullets even quicker with bigger explosions. The entire movie is like, one big videogame! In fact, heh, sometimes I felt like I could have been sat in the cinema with an x-box controller in my hand! And I'd lick the sweat off it to chase some kind of pubescent hormone buzz, all the while training my brain to use a computer to affect what was happening in front of me. Hello? We're all cyborgs now. Put that as your guardian headline for some clicks dawg.



Another important aspect of the film is medical care. In the future we will invent beds that will pour glitter on us whilst giving us full body MRI scans. This is the cure for everything, from bad teeth all the way up to blood cancer. For some reason Sarah Mildew, the president of Elysium, doesn't want anyone on Earth to have a billion dollar smile and keeps all of the medical pods in space to herself and her robot pals. In the vacuum of space we see similarities to the ocean, where Americans often flee to England for our free healthcare. Unlike us, the Elysium class bourgeoise blast them with rocket launchers. I felt as if the movie was putting across the message that this was okay and after thinking about it, I agree. What is the best way to cure sickness than death? A lot of thought is also given to the economic status of the Elysites versus the Earthlings. In one hand there is an entire planet of people, on the other there is a space station full of nob heads. Why don't the Earthlings simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become a little more self sufficient, rather that relying on constantly falling billionaires for...something? Jobs? They may as well just go colonize the moon for all I care.



Now onto a hot button topic; the special effects extravaganza! H. R. Giger was roped in to doing the designs for the robots, whilst Gary Gygax designed the actual Elysium space station. I have seen the model in real life and I don't think I'm giving any industry secrets away when I say the model isn't in space. All of the scenes that involved the Elysium space station was actually filmed in Gygax's garage. Half of the frame would be covered and the space station footage was filmed, they rewound the camera and then filmed the Earth in the other half of the frame. What you end up with is one slick piece of visual effects that will leave your eyes watering for weeks!




I like to think that Elysium is probably one of my most favourite films, at least recent films, the action is gorgeous, Matt Damon absolutely kills it with his half-silent hero and the blossoming romance that happens on screen will keep the broads awake in between the spectacular shots of people being literally ripped apart by bullets and explosions and their faces being reconstructed in magic machines only to be mashed into burger meat moments later! There is also a good moral message to the film; make sure you get rich now so your kids don't have to live in a third world hell-hole by the time they've lost their milk teeth. If you enjoyed this movie I would also recommend Real Steel because it is also about robots but in that film the robots just fight each other, only a few people die. Aslo check out the movie 'Rocket Dad'.

Ikea

Ikea.

The word summons up a winter landscape covered in a wide variety of cheap furniture half-buried beneath the snow. A vision of a future where the last humans are laid to rest in pine flat-pack coffins stacked on the roadsides of silent cities. Doll children remain where they were abandoned. Electric cameras in galleries have been watching works of art for a million years. In this place there are no animals, plants or bacteria. The DNA inside fossils has petrified. Everything is still.

Ikea.

Aliens Of Kepler 186-f

The National Associated Space Agency (NASA) has recently discovered life on another planet. The planet, Kepler 186-f orbits the Kepler star, an M dwarf that is roughly 44% the size and strength of our sun. Scientists are already deciding on renaming the planet something more memorable, such as Tarkus or Izitso, due to its importance in the history of human civilization.

The planet is composed mostly of rocks and ice due to being a lot further out than Earth relative to Sol. Because of the weakness of Kepler at high noon it gets as bright as a nightclub toilet so therefore the vegetation of the planet is enormous. The leaves on the trees are each as big as satellite dishes, and of a similar shape. Fungus is also prevalent, as on Tarkus the ice gets mouldy. Due to the spectrum of light thrown from Kepler, the flowers are all ultraviolet and lack any visible colour. Kepler 186-f also has no moon and so its oceans are still. These enormous ponds are home to shark frogs and leech whales, above them fly flocks of giant flies that have the ability to sing like birds, although they do this through their proboscis and so create a sound similar to a wet trumpet. On the plains of ice live a variety of strange alien creatures that are reminiscent to some of the animals on our planet; wooly pigs, two headed cat monsters, tortoise spiders and mirrors that walk around to name but a few.

Kepler 186-f is 600 lightyears away, so we are seeing the planet 600 years ago. If the aliens living there had good enough telescope technology and were watching us, they would see the world in 1414, perhaps watching the Battle of Agincourt and wondering if we were imbeciles who ate mud and slept in chimneys. With this intergalactic empathy in mind, the supposed most intelligent being on Kepler 186-f are the Kepleroids. These strange beings look a little like us, although with eyes the size of basketballs standing on highly veined stalks. They appear to live in a village that spans entire continents, often walking for miles to visit their neighbours with what must be meat pies. They also play a variety of night sports and ride around on dead horse things with the legs replaced with wheels. The Kepleroids seem like a benign and peaceful race, and it would be ethical to eat them should the opportunity ever arise.

A NASA spokesman suggested that we build a spaceship and send it off to explore this planet and exploit it for any fossil fuels they may not be using. This alien petrol would be made from alien dinosaurs and would power a car to drive from Paris to Beijing on a single tank! NASA is currently looking for a crack team of astronauts to go on this mission and have styled the crew requirements to mirror that of the characters in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Although a 'Wesley Crusher' isn't required.

OKStupid: The World Of Online Dating Cracked Open Like An Egg

I approach the bar with some trepidation; it has been years since I have been on a date. Due to a recent string of mysterious events I ended up on a semi-blind date with somebody I had met on the internet. The world of online dating wasn't new to me; I had used it before to help crack the case of the mysterious OKCupid Killer, although this time I wasn't seeing it through the objective lens of a criminal profiler but of the sort of embarrassed, sort of curious, sort of desperate subjective lens of a single male living in the city.

With my legs freshly shaved and the new clothes I was wearing brushing against my body like the wings of a moth, I felt like a new person. Not just new; different. I was a strong, independent man with my own life. As I pushed open the doors of the bar I decided that whatever was to happen on this date, it didn't change that fact. It was just a bit of fun, right? On the other hand I could be walking into destiny; to meet the future mother of my ten or so children who would cradle my dying body in a lethal skiing accident. I saw her waiting at the bar. She was a lot shorter than her profile said she was. As I neared I began to smell the furniture polish that would continue to dominate the olfactory senses for the rest of the night.
"Hello." I said, leaning my head slightly as I appeared into her view. She turned to me and smiled.
"Hi." she said. We introduced ourselves. She offered to buy me a drink, but I declined. We went and sat by a table by the window and began to talk, though within five minutes our conversation was drowned out by nineties RnB. After a strained conversation she suggested we go to another bar down the street, a bit quieter.
"So, what do you do then?" I asked her eventually.
"I'm between jobs at the moment, heh. You?"
"I'm a journalist." I say. She'd started to buy me drinks, the Peach Schnapps cocktails were slightly sickly sweet and not doing my empty stomach any favours.
"Oh right, like Nicholas Parsons?" she said.
"Uh...yeah." I said.

For the most part she talked throughout the night, of her love of football and previous relationships she had, now and then making what I imagine were meant to be flirtatious comments though she came across as a bit creepy. Nevertheless, she kept buying me drinks and before long I was feeling quite drunk and after returning from the bathroom and waiting for her to put her phone down, I couldn't help but begin to flirt back. When we left that bar her hand 'accidentally' brushed across my rock hard chest, although neither of us acknowledged it.
"I think I'll go home now." I said, looking around for a taxi.
"Yeah, it's getting late huh?" she said. I nodded and watched as she flagged down a black cab. We rode in silence, although even through the drunken haze I began to panic slightly. She hadn't given the driver her address. I should have gotten dropped off outside a shop or something. But before I could find a way out we were outside my flat. She paid the driver and looked around.
"So, it was nice meeting you." I said, smiling at her.
"Do you mind if I come in for coffee?" she said. I paused. Did she just mean coffee? Or more? She had been buying me drinks all night, surely I could make her a brew, thank her and let her leave.

She entered my flat and looked around. She seemed out of place. An intruder.
"What's that? That's mad that." she said, pointing at a framed print on the wall.
"Judith beheading Holofernes. It's by Caravaggio." I said.
"Who?"
"He's an artist. Did you say you wanted coffee?" I said, going to the kitchen. She followed me and had her hands on my hips.
"I don't need a coffee." she said, voice low. I turned around, her face was inches away from mine. The smell of furniture polish was overpowering.
"Oh." I said. She leant in for a kiss, I couldn't help but reciprocate. She was eager, at one point our teeth rubbed together like the twisting of a pearl necklace. She took a few steps back and lifted up her dress, revealing herself and looking at me expectantly. I shook my head slowly and climbed onto the kitchen counter.

She left soon after, leaving me to sit alone in my flat with a herbal infusion and Radio 6 playing in the background. There was a chime from my phone, another e-mail from the dating site. I looked out of my window and sighed. Why did I live in this dumb robot future instead of the golden days of house phones and dance halls? I rolled up a trouser leg and began to tattoo a daisy chain around my calf.

Plastic Artifacts From 20th Century Cartoons