McGillicuddy Serious Party
Please find a collection of four poster pictures, a t-shirt (female and male from young adult upwards) and a Billboard with a different poster on each side available to have fun with in your Sims 3 game.
The poster pictures use a mesh with many thanks by Yarona at Sims Modeli, and the Billboards use a mesh from the much missed Cloudwalker Sims so you do not need any stuff packs for this to work – it’s all base game friendly.
To use, download, unzip, and drop the contained folder into your The Sims 3modspackages folder and they should show up.
Enjoy!
The McGillicuddy Serious Party of New Zealand was the ‘political wing’ of the fraudulent Clan McGillicuddy (formed 1978), whose ‘warriors’, the McGillicuddy Highland Army were involved in the pastime of ‘pacifist warfare’ – a parody of not only warfare, but of self-important warfare reenactment groups and the whole historical revisionist romanticism of machismo the Scottish warrior clan and Maori taua systems. Their usual opponents were Alf’s Imperial Army (founded in 1972 by Ian Brackenbury Channell aka The Wizard of New Zealand).
‘Pacifist warfare’ involves paper swords, paper swords, flour bombs, rotten soft fruit and water pistols. The end result is usually mass confusion amongst spectators, not least of all as it tends to be done flash mob style.
The McGSP was formed somewhat hurriedly in 1984 to lampoon what they saw as an increasingly and wilfully out of touch political class happy to tell voters at election time whatever they wanted to hear before doing as they pleased once elected (particularly over nuclear power, the allowance of American nuclear weapons in New Zealand territorial waters, and the issue of Maori rights).
Led by Graeme Cairns, the party stood candidates in the 1984, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1996 and 1999 general elections; the 1986, 1989, 1992, 1995 and 1998 Local elections; along with numerous by-elections and of course student elections. Like all ‘loony’ parties, the McGSP paid for their electoral costs by staging fundraising concerts and entertainments (particularly the Big Muffin Serious Band).
The central plank of the McGSP platform was what it terms ‘The Great Leap Backwards’ to return New Zealand to medieval times (the logic being most ‘progressive’ platforms in practice tend to have converse effects in practice, such as China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ which proved so irresponsible it resulted in one of history’s worst genocides from mass starvation). The McGSP promised full unemployment; to raise the school leaving age to 65; and demolish all parliamentary buildings on a last up, first down basis – targetting particularly the ‘Beehive’, New Zealand’s executive building for those running the country. It also promised to break all its promises, a standard trope of ‘loony’ parties.
Due to standing in the majority of contested seats from 1990 onwards, as a potential party of government they were entitled to a party political broadcast – the first ‘loony’ party worldwide to do so – and to state funding, a matter of controversy. The party became a totem of the argument about allowing ‘frivilous’ parties to stand in serious elections, and the problem of declining election turn outs due to a declining choice of parties as costs spiralled to put elections increasingly beyond the reach of those without major financial backers.
1993 was arguably the party’s high water mark. Aside from once more standing in the majority of seats at the general election, they took their biggest share of the vote (a mere 0.61% – but that any voted for them at all was remarkable in itself). They had been helped by the prior events of the 17th April 1993 Tauranga by-election when MP Winston Peters resigned from the National Party he’d become increasingly disillusioned with and on a point of principle resigned his seat to fight a by-election for the right to retain his seat as an independent.
Peters had become a notorious gadfly over the years for his views on government corruption, immigration, Maori issues (being half-Maori) and tax evasion – the 1992 ‘Winebox Inquiry’ Peters instigated but which resulted in no prosecutions despite damning evidence played a major party in convincing many their nation had become a corrupt tax haven.
The main parties – the National, Labour, Christian Heritage and even the Alliance (a combine of the Social Credit Party, Greens, New Labour and the Maoris’ Mana Motuhake) boycotted the election claiming it was a waste of taxpayers’ money so close to a general election (in the event, that never happened until November of that year – seven months later). But most New Zealanders felt this was a feeble attempt to discredit Peters over a by-election all knew they hadn’t a hope of winning.
In the event, the McGSP finished second – one of only two remotely recognisable party candidates which stood, the other being the so-called ‘Natural Law Party’ (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation cult abusing electoral laws designed to help the parties of the rich, allowing it free TV advertising time and free advertising promotion mail-drops under a guise of ‘political activity’). The rest were an array of extremist single-issue cranks (mostly religion or drugs), now acquiring media space and time due to the dearth of candidates.
One of the McGSP’s tag lines since 1987 had been ‘better to vote for harmless loonies than dangerous nutcases’ – whatever the result, the Tauranga by-election gave them a national platform to make that very point. A party of gadflys helping legitimise the principled stance of another gadfly by the very act of standing against him – especially in the wake of the Winebox Inquiry whitewash – also helped legitimise their own right to stand.
One of the McGSP’s most infamous policies came during the 1993 election, during the battle over potential gay rights legislation. Feeling both sides of the argument were exaggerating how much they really cared about an issue they’d ignored for decades out of much the same political expedience, the McGSP announced there would be compulsory homosexuality for a third of the population – upping the ante on those candidates platforming themselves as ‘pro’ and throughly infuriating the ‘family values’ on the opposite side.
The party also claimed ‘… shortly after the McGillicuddy Serious Party comes to power, New Zealand will mysteriously disappear from all maps.’ – twenty five years before this long running routine cartographical omission from world maps went from being a bugbear to an national outcry when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern raised the matter in Parliament, only for it to be pointed out New Zealand was missing even on a monochromatic map of the world on the government’s own 404 web page.
The McGSP eventually disintegrated as costs spiralled to put them and most other minor parties out of business, along with internal controversy over the party being hijacked by anarchist and pro-cannabis groups for their own agenda. In 1999, it’s vote collapsed to a third of its previous share. The party deregistered in December 1999 as an act of penance for their abysmal showing in that year’s general election (party leader Graeme Cairns also placed himself in stocks in Garden Place in Hamilton in December 1999 whilst disgruntled party members pelted him with rotten fruit), but re-registered for the new millenia.
Like many ‘loony’ parties, they’d also offered members ‘lifetime’ memberships in the early years, and scrapping this for renewable annual memberships in order to raise funds felt to many the party was ‘selling out’. The final straw for many was the press printing a ‘party press release’ about the forthcoming 2005 general election unaware it was from a disgruntled ex-member. It was decided to sit out the general election and sort themselves out in time for the next one – it never happened.
Some members went on to become the core of a more professionally run NZ Green Party (which used to run its own ‘pacifist army’), and two former McGSP candidates became Green MPs, one of whom – Metiria Turei – became NZ Green Party co-leader until forced to leave politics in disgrace in 2017 due to a social security fraud.
Although veteran candidate Steve Richards stood as a McGSP candidate in the 2008 general election in the West Coast-Tasman seat and beat the United Future Party candidate in first preference votes (then part of a coalition government with the Nationals), this was unofficial, and at the time of writing, the McGillicuddy Serious Party has remained deregistered since 2005.
On the Killakee Road in Dublin, across the road from the site of the original Killakee House, lies the current one – formerly known as The Steward’s House.
It was the site of Ireland’s chapter of the Hell Fire Club (the stories of which are – in typical Irish fashion – exaggerated beyond all credulity: gave a quick potted history of the Hell Fire Club in the review of The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina), a gun battle during Ireland’s two internal wars in the 20th century where to put it bluntly atrocities were the norm, and sundry other atrocious acts down the ages, so it is perhaps no surprise that it is reputed to be haunted.
The best known ghost, however, is that of a very pissed off black cat. When the property was turned into an Arts Centre in the late 60s and early 70s, it appeared, glowering and hissing, and the sight of this larger than normal malevolent feline was enough to cause superstitious builders and joiners to give themselves the sack on the spot. Those who remained were subjected to poltergeist activity which meant a high turnover of the workforce.
Considering Ireland’s economy at that time was up the spout long before the world recession had even started, this was pretty extraordinary. An exorcism only appeared to make matters worse.
There was speculation that the spectre was demonic in origin, but the truth is probably a little more simple, and cruel.
It used to be the case when large buildings were built in the British Isles, a cat would be slaughtered and put into the foundations, or even worse be sealed up alive within the stonework from the absurd belief its ghost would protect the property from evil spirits.
Ireland being more superstitious than the rest of these isles, this barbaric practice lasted well into the 19th century: making it more than likely this ‘lucky’ cat was either within the existing foundations built over, or was included within the stonework of the new building – being so close to where the Hell Fire Club used to hold its meetings may well have prompted the builders to commit this wicked act.
Whatever the case ‘Lucky’ did not take kindly to the renovations (perhaps too close to its final resting place), and the house went through a series of disastrous business ventures before finally revering back to becoming a private dwelling again not open to the public.
Whether ‘Lucky’ is still patrolling the corridors of Kilakee House to make sure no further meddling takes place is a matter only the current owners will know – and they certainly refuse to discuss it.
In their latest quest for relevance, the staff at The Guardian-Observer (its the same paper, no matter how much they pretend otherwise) have decided to do what the music press (remember them, grandparents?) tried to do and start telling ‘the kids’ what’s the next big trend in music.
It appears that ‘woke folk’ is where it’s at with today’s Momentumed Millenials and bearded hipster scum. It must be true – The Observer says so!
Coming from a newspaper which treated the Quality Street tin Victoriana kitch of The Unthanks as cutting edge, it’s all too easy to be cynical.
That their cover star – Grace Petrie – is a feminist vegan lesbian socialist who sucked up the Guardian’s arses by writing a song about them and providing cliché copy whining about ‘white, Telegraph-reading folk-club regulars’ (in her narrow world you’re not allowed to like music if you’re not politically correct enough) shows that no matter how hard they try, the Guardian/Observer can no more escape their own ludicrous backward stereotype than The Sun, Daily Mail or any of those other rivals it despises – stuck in their own little timewarp of what constitutes an ideal world fifty years past the point the world has long since moved on.
‘Here are bands confronting the legacies of abortion rights; the oppression of women, homosexuals and other minority communities’ they gush, ‘the loss of minority language; the refugee crisis; and stories of people who have stood up to hate.’
You’d think Fairport Convention never happened: the band who almost single handedly resurrected British Isles folk, broadened its horizons and are partly to blame for the monster of modern music known as ‘the experimental side project’. Nor for that matter The Pogues (whose guitarist Phil Chevron was gay and who were notorious for their lyrics on politics and the darker side of life) and of course the most ‘woke’ of them all, The Men They Couldn’t Hang who spawned a multitude of copycats worldwide – the most famous of all being Floggin’ Molly.
Even a certain bunch of professional ‘wokesters’ – Chumbawamba – crashed into folk with a whole album of old folk protest songs, before doing some a lot newer with folk icons The Albion Band.
Folk has enjoyed peaks and troughs of popularity ever since Richard Thompson, Ashley Hutchings gathered assorted collections of talented oddballs to their various standards over the decades. To the cry of ‘let a thousand initiatives bloom’, what was the quaint but dying music of yokels retained its relevance to audiences old and new by constant reinvention.
Even then, they were doing no more than the Beatles in their more thoughtful moments had also done when John Lennon made friends with Donovan – whose honey and walnut voiced protegy Vashti Bunyan was to make an album ‘Just Another Diamond Day’ copied by every folk musician if they were honest ever since.
Every time The Guardian-Observer opens their mouth about popular culture, they demonstrate their real interest is controlling it to fit their rigid vision of an ideal society, the wet dreams of Soviet style utopias comfortable middle class suburbanites are prone to in their sillier moments after one glass of cheap Waitrose wine too many.
PS. It gets funnier if you read the Comments section below the article. Their readers are even more stupid than they are.
Roger Daltrey becomes Johnny Rotten, and Jarvis Cocker is now the lead singer of Blur. Brilliant! Garath Treadwell ought to do the Guardian’s weekend supplements for them on a Saturday if they can only get him to find his inner wokeness.
That Moment The Mission Debuted On Top Of The Pops…
Once upon a time in dear old Blighty, there was a music programme called ‘Top Of The Pops’.
Before MTV became popular, before the internet, back in the days when under a handful of TV channels and a few commercial radio stations were all there was for musicians to get mass attention, it was a very big deal to get on it – the difference between your record selling 1000 copies a week or 50000 copies a day.
When the eighties came along and people’s clothes began to look they’d poured a bucket of Skittles in with the washing, the appearence of bands mimicking old time punks Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Damned, Toyah, Bauhaus, The Cure and The Cult did make them stick out like sore thumbs just a bit, and Goth really didn’t do itself much favours by the first band ever to appear on TOTP with the new tagline – looking like extras from an episode of Doctor Who,
The Mission debuted on 19th March 1987 with the rather weak ‘Severina’ – the previous much stronger single ‘Wasteland’ was banned from airplay (due to the BBC and independent broadcasters showing a distinct lack of bottle when faced with loudmouthed militant born again Christian groups at the time stamping on anything ‘blasphemous’ or – even worse – hinting of paganism).
The band looked a bloody sight, Hussey couldn’t have been any more camp if he tried, and the public thought they were some hippy take on Boy George’s Culture Club (ironically, he was No.1 at the time with his first solo record after the latter fell apart due to their leader being a pathetic junkie). At least his purple went with the lights.
The cherry on top was Julianne Regan of All About Eve – The Mission’s ‘sister’ group – on backing vocals, complete with overbite and looking like she’d just crawled out of bed from some student dorm.
It did do the trick, however unintentionally, in killing stone dead the ‘goth threat’ sensationalism by tabloid journalists seeking the next circulation boosting morale crusade or those killjoys who see every ‘yoof’ movement as a threat to civilisation.
Which meant after this…
… no one bothered to complain about this (opening track of the 1st October 1987 show), until it was too late.
Eldritch and Morticia with the Sisterhood’s Chorus of Vengence – now Goth seemed like a good idea.
Happy Super Blood Wolf Moon Morning!
Permission to squee has been granted
Steve Hackett, You F**king ARSEHOLE – Doing A Cruelty To Tarantulas Promotional Video For Your Next Album!
I am beyond angry about this (in tears), and it says a lot about YouTube this shit has been allowed to stay up beyond twenty four hours.
The third and final video for Steve Hackett’s forthcoming album ‘At The Edge Of Light’ came out yesterday, for the track ‘Beasts In Our Time.’
One minute and eleven seconds into the video, a man sees his daughter afraid of a tarantula. How does he deal with it? Show her it was harmless? Trap and remove it? No, he crushes the spider in his hand and throws it away like it was a piece of rubbish!
Coming from a musician who likes to flaunt planet friendly eco-credentials, this is beyond f**king belief!
I’m fond of spiders. I admit it took a while to be. I understand people are scared of them – used to be myself, until I watched one spin a web outside my classroom window one rainy afternoon many years ago, and felt guilty for ever having hated and feared something which could produce something of such delicate, exquisite beauty.
But you live and let live – and actively encouraging people to be cruel to spiders as ‘normal’ behaviour is as shitty as encouraging people to torment animals (or worse) on the internet for hits.
There’s a lot of people who keep tarantulas as pets – and that undoubtedly WAS a pet tarantuala, bred in captivity for the purpose, which was used in the video. How do you think they feel about people posting shit where tarantulas are made to fight with other spiders, or wasps, or other cruel shit, then some touchy-feely ‘artist’ does something like this!
A pet tarantuala, killed to make a poxy pop video for an artist whose last album I loved to bits. Thanks a bunch, you skeet!
The blurb accompanying this song says :‘the track ‘Beasts In Our Time’ is the main thrust of this album, exposing fear, greed and intolerance.’
All the video exposes is the immature fear and intolerance of spiders from morons whose knowledge of one of the most important parts of our eco-system appears to have been derived from far too many late night Hammer Horror movies.
In the British Isles since medievel times, we have a saying: ‘IF YOU WISH TO LIVE AND THRIVE, LET THE SPIDER RUN ALIVE!’ – in the days before pesticides, the spider was the best protector from disease carrying, food despoiling, crop ruining flies and beetles. Their webs were used to staunch wounds sustained in battle or from accidents (loaded with blood clotting Vitamin K, many of our ancestors owe their lives to some conveniently nearby spider’s web), and are still used in both medicine and optimetrics.
In California, it is the Black Widow spider’s messy cobswebs over the grape crops which provide the best protection against parasites than any pesticides. They may be feared for their venom, but there are many Americans who owe a lack of a cockroach infestation to some busy black widow (or some other spider’s web in the cellar, or any one of the many varieties of wolf spider) for ensuring these disgusting disease spreaders don’t get past first base.
Across the world, many types of frog live in close proximity to large spiders such as the tarantula for mutual protection – the frogs eat up the ants and small insects which prey on the tarantulas and their eggs (including certain types of wasp), and the tarantulas are a deterrent to snakes, rodents and other creatures which prey on the frogs. They can coexist and work with other creatures. However with humans it is all too often one way – as exemplified by this stupid video.
If you are on Twitter, let these morons know this sort of shit is not on – ever!
https://twitter.com/genesis_news/status/1086569325836816385
https://twitter.com/HackettOfficial/status/1086209498967146496
info@hackettsongs.com – Hackett’s website
or: Hackett Songs, 5 Bure Way, Aylsham, Norfolk, NR11 6HL.
Lonely Island was created and owned by Rflong7/13, but was taken over by some undead Simmies for a bit of peace and quiet after involuntary resurrection from Ivy Hill Graveyard. It includes some others escaping from their own ‘life issues’, and is a sanctuary for the much maligned Butterfly of Doom and many other misunderstood species of Sims nature.
It’s been a long while, yet the residents of Rflong7/13’s Lonely Island are still there making the best of things, and the Jazz-Hands Gnubb Club (with its underground swimming pool, band space and other amusements) is still its central hub.
‘Hello, I am Elysia Knaith, Chargés d’Affaires ad nauseum and current First Speaker of the Lonely Island Wotchyamacaulit – the ruling council of the island and its dependencies – and I live by one of the many splendid beaches which Lonely Island has to offer the discerning tourist seeking quiet contemplation in idyllic surroundings.
‘Our community has gone through many trials and tribulations over the years, but here we remain, self sufficient and now an exporter of fine foodstuffs, music, arts and – um – other things perhaps best not brought up in polite conversation.
‘Here on Lonely Island we’ve shown that there’s a useful role to the wider Simmie society to be played by we – ahem! – involuntarily resurrected: what used to be referred to as livormorts, but we prefer the term Argyrians now as a little less morbid sounding.’
‘I still say it makes you sound like monsters from Doctor Who!’
‘Hush, Haily! Arrumph, as I was saying, We may be all from different background, shapes, sizes, opinions, um … lifestates … whatever – but together we have worked to build the harmonious community we are so proud of today.’
‘Undead freak? You’re calling me an undead freak?’
‘ – and we still all love to come together when the opportunity provides to knock a few Gnubb sticks around and chew the rag.’
‘Listen witless Whitsun Winterbottom, I’d rather be an undead freak than a brain dead dunghill with a ten gallon hat on a half pint head!’
‘And, um, occasionally lose the rag as well – which in Hazel Tyneham’s case is a rare event may I add. Usually it’s Rowan that dishes out the family’s insults.
‘But look! there’s young Shrove Winterbottom with Switch Cloverstardropper. Now they occasionally have their differences, but that’s never stopped them from remaining civil to one another.’
‘ – and I’m telling you for the last time, or else, stop calling me Pancake!’
‘Alright, I’ll call you F**KFACE instead!’
‘Um, yes, well, ahem, things can sometimes get a little, um, overheated – we are a passionate bunch out here as you would expect in a community of talented artisans over many important matters’ ***cough!*** [mutters] Gordon bleeding Bennett couldn’t they all have bloody behaved just for one day? ‘As you can see over there, Diggory Winterbottom and Grigor Gasterlich are discussing as ever important matters of international commerce and high finance.’
‘ – and quite aside from the television which left my wife traumatised, that crummy watch you sold me Ghastly keeps time worse than a drunken drummer the few times I’ve actually got it to work – and you said both had lifetime guarantees!’
‘My dear Diggory! This is most concerning! Have you saw a doctor? Consulted with a mainland hospital?’
‘A doctor? What’s a doctor got to do with this?’
‘Why, if I – Grigor Gasterlich, international entrepreneur and philanthropist – have sold you items with lifetime guarantees, and these misfortunes have occured, there can only be one rational explanation: you must be seriously ill!’
‘You see what’s happened to this place Elysia Knaith ever since you took charge? I came here with my family seven years ago to seek a more ecologically sustainable way of life, mindfulness and to find ourselves.
‘Instead, we found ourselves stuck on a plumbobbing pirates’ cove, surrounded by invading escaped zombie smurfs, escaped crooks, escaped sociopaths and escaped psychopaths – or those who are a combination of each!
‘What sort of low down, sleezy, corrupt cesspit has this place become?’
‘The FINEST in the whole Simming world – making us the Simmies we are today!’ ***wobbles bottom lip***
Haily ‘Skeletal Screams’ Farber tends to get all patriotic at times like this.
An escapee from Haunted Valley Sanitorium (she is the only Simmie whose psychosis resulted in an international treaty agreeing to her permanent incarceration as a danger to all carbon based lifeforms’ physical and mental health), she’s been holed up ironically in another of Rflong7/13’s lands ever since!
‘At least Diggory’s boho wife Felicity is able to get on with the undead islanders a little better.’
‘Look Diggory darling, look, I’m actually winning against Willow Tyneham – the island champion!’
Willow’s in one of her cruel moods today – she’s letting Felicity have a head start and build up her hopes before embarking on her routine destruction of most who plays her. Again out of character – she’s the only one on the island almost as stark raving bonkers as Haily – but the Winterbottoms tend to bring out the worst in the Tynehams.
Diggory isn’t the only one complaining.
‘Why are we still staying here in this free range lunatic asylum!’
‘Because we’ve still got international warrants for our arrests issued by the Council of the United Nations of The Sims for revenue tax evasion in Sunset Valley, Riverview, Bridgeport, Starlight Shores, Lucky Palms, Hidden Springs, Roaring Heights, Sunlit Tides, Monte Vista, Shang Simla, Champs Les Sims and Al Simhara after that damn accountancy firms arrangements for the world tours for The Sarcastic Badgers, The Key Cutters, The Catwampus Imperative and Daisy Disaster were all found to be fraudulent. They’re all doing 10 000 years in jail – and that was on appeal!’
‘But the only reason for coming here to this glorified nature reserve was in getting ourselves elected onto the island’s running council and put in charge we’d acquire diplomatic immunity – now we’ve voted off there’s nothing to stop them coming here after us.’
‘Only if Elysia lets them come on – and she’s not gonna do that! She’s given me her word.’
‘And you trust her?’
‘Um – you really didn’t need to be hearing any of that. They were just – ahahaha! – rehearsing their lines for a new play – yes, that’s it! – our local thespian Smedley Bracegirdle is organising – Casting Spreadsheets On The Waves or something like that.’
‘Nice try, Pinocchio. Ruff-ruff! I’m a little woof-woof and I like doggy…’
‘YES THANK YOU HAILY! Innit marvellous! You try to do a plug for your homeland – only for this lot to make a buttplug out of it!’
‘At least unlike this tip you can get some fun from a buttplug!’
‘Witty darling, language please!’
‘I’ll ram my toe up your arse at high speed never mind a buttplug if I get any more of your lip Witless, you saucy little git! Look, this lot have their disagreements, but look what’s happening now with Diggory and Uncle Ghastly, er I mean Grigor Gasterlich.’
‘He’s telling about his new investments market portfolio. It’s a top down bottom up multi layered inter-dimensional hedge and shubbery fund, and Diggory’s falling for it, um, I mean considering making an educated investment in it.’
‘Look at young Shrove and Switch – a few moments ago they were almost at each other’s throats.’
‘But now they’re discussing in earnest the new limited edition My Little Ponies Of The Apocalypse coming out in the spring.’
‘Indeed, Elysia is correct – apologies for this apropos interdiction. Rowan Tyneham, at your service! My sisters and I may have the occasional intemperate contemporary contretemps with one’s neighbours, but one never forgets one’s neighbours are always one’s friends.’
‘Even Whitsun Winterbottom, who one concurs can be – if you pardon the venacular – a f**king oxygen thief needing his face shoved in a food blender.’
‘Um ***cough!*** thank you for that Rowan – I think! Lonely Island may be at times a loony bin – but it’s our little loony bin, and I wouldn’t swap it for the world!’
A Nintendo Switch Tale For Christmas: ‘Who Are You Trying To Skykid?’
Meh! What’s this stupid game I’ve been given?
A thirty three year old arcade game the oldies remember, and they’ve putting it into a 2018 handheld gaming system with a bunch of other wrinklies games?
Pur-leeeeese!
Stupid game. Stupid controls. Everything in 2-D. What’s the point?
Yeah I know Limbo was in 2-D, but that was different! It is a classic atmospheric game which broke new boundaries in what can be done outside of the confines of the isometric gaming genre.
Okay okay, I’m giving it a proper chance and not giving up cause I’m no good at it cause I don’t like it.
There, look, see? Made it to sucky level three, and have found strategies to cope with being shot at from front, behind and the ground.
Yes, I know the loop the loop button is vital. It took me a couple of hours to realise this.
Yeah, I still say it sucks! It’s just I had to have something to do while waiting for Sims 3 to load up.
Then having to wait for the Sims 3 world to load up.
Then having to wait for Create-A-Sim to load up fully so I can use it.
Then having to wait for Accessories to load up fully so I can use it.
It is useful to me right now. It still means nothing to me. A distraction. A brief time killer.
I’M GOING TO BEAT THIS EFFING SKEET ARSETURNIP OF A GAME IF IT IS THE LAST THING I DAMN WELL DO!
The Nazi Christmas Turkey: Dear Mark Collett, Are You Feeling INCREDIBLY STUPID Yet?
It may be the season of goodwill to all human kind, but never when you’re on the political extremes, whose idea of a Christmas feast is gorging themselves on every example they can find of political correctness gone mad or some special interest group being nasty towards vanilla whiteys.
Mark Collett used to be a big deal on the far-right. A former right-hand man of Nick Griffin and head of the British National Party’s youth wing, he became the party’s head of publicity during their heyday until he fell out with Nasty Nick shortly before the BNP began to implode.
Ever since, he’s been trying to reestablish himself in ‘patriot’ circles, unfortunately for him they tend to have very long memories and could hold grudges for Britain at the Olympics to gold medal winning level. He may be a hopeless bigot (loves Hitler, hates non-whites, gays, anyone with a funny walk or eats funny food or reads funny books, etc), but they’ll never forgive him or Griffin for ‘selling out’
‘Selling out’ to ‘racial nationalists’ doesn’t mean the same as it does to, for example, pretentious music fans when their favourite band’s sound becomes more mainstream in order to get more people to like them (or, more often than not, because they’ve learned to write songs and play their instruments properly). It has little in practice with anything to do with watering down ‘the message’ (the message in question all too often being ‘Heil Hitler’…).
No, in these queer circles, ‘selling out’ means anyone silly enough to organise a far-right party properly enough to win votes and win elections, resulting in the sort of mass attention from the media and general public (the internet is a wonderful thing!) under which their whole house of cards very quickly falls apart, and anyone espousing those view was cast back into the political wilderness for another two decades.
(This doesn’t tend to happen with the far-left. They simply spend all their time trying to hijack the Labour Party. With predictable results.)
In the BNP’s case, they did have a professional politics lecturer in Andrew Brons as one of their MEPs, someone able to argue their case with the facts and decades of practical dialectic experience. Which is why of course the BNP avoided doing so like the plague, had Nick Griffin, Simon Darby and Mark Collett handle the media duties, and to no-one’s surprise but their own provided the general public with some splendid car crash moments on live TV.
Never mind Griffin’s toe curling performance on ‘Question Time’ (when you have an open goal like Jack Straw on the panel and still end up looking like the biggest fool, you should know you’re out of your tiny depth), there were endless spats between Simon Darby and Kate ‘All I Want For Christmas Is A Top Lip’ Burley over the years on Sky News (including one where he asks her if she’d got out of the wrong side of bed!)
No longer so young Master Collett has tried to reestablish himself with little success, even suffering the humiliation of the Leave Campaign taking out a court order to stop him and his girlfriend from distributing their leaflets during the EU Referendum campaign of 2016 in a bid to politically rehabilitate themselves.
His latest ploy on Twitter – the perfect place for a twit – has been making various cheap clickbait posts with all the objectivity of a tabloid headline writer.
Savour this little beauty from a few days ago:
Ah, the old ‘bad Muslims covered up by a politically correct media’ trope.
Of course, a certain business at Gatwick Airport with drones may have been dominating some of their attention (along with a homeless man freezing to death outside Parliament on the day they were debating whether or not the leader of the Opposition had called the Prime Minister a ‘stupid woman’).
Or it may have been because it was old news from two days before by the time it met with Master Collett’s attention.
So much for mainstream media silence – on the national broadcaster no less. That’s that one knocked right on the head, as the apple would have said to Sir Issac Newton (followed by ‘take a bath, you historically notorious soap dodger!)
But it gets better.
It has also turned out his attempt to troll YouTube with what was little more than a moronic ‘lads banter’ video looks set to cost him his taxi driver’s licence.
The whole business done and dusted a day before it came to Collett’s notice. No wonder he was such a success as the head of the BNP’s media department.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Dear BBC – There Is A Rather Obvious Fatal Flaw With Your ‘Watership Down’ Television Movies
Here is the original 1979 version:
Bigwig and Dandelion and Hazel and Fiver and Blackberry and Pipkin – wondering why Violet’s flying through the sky in the bloody talons of a hawk.
Then wondering who Violet was anyway as they weren’t in the book!
You were able to rhyme off the names the second you saw this shot, right?
Now for the BBC version.
Oh look it’s Hazel and Fiver, but which one is which? They are impossible to tell apart!
The background scenery is brilliant, even if not canon in parts – Efrafa now in an abandoned factory which looks like the basement of the Shalebridge Cradle instead of the crossroads of a bridle path. If you’ve ever wanted to see what Nuthanger Farm really looks like, it’s a faultless job.
Pity the rabbits (which look and move more like hares) are so hard to tell apart and so difficult to remember. Even their voices largely melt into Stepford levels of sameness. Amusingly, General Woundwort once more sports that non-book blind white left eye from 1979 which has become the character’s signature enough to also appear in the hopeless children’s ITV series many years ago. Less amusing is his supermodel svelteness – this one doesn’t look like he could knock the skin off the producer’s skinny Nescafé.
The other animals are done so badly it’s painful. Everyone knows crows and all other corvidae attack with quick stabbing motions with their beaks while staying partly in flight (to get out of trouble as fast as they got into it should their victim prove a more dangerous adversary than taken for), not trying to attack with the claws on their feet or ‘bite’ with their beaks – biting in combat is by those with teeth. Nuthanger Farm’s Bob is now a rottweiler, not a black labrador, a breed largely unknown in the 1970s and certainly never kept on a working farm. Working farms mean working farm dogs: sheepdogs, retrievers, not the canine equivalent of nightclub bouncers. As for Tab the cat, let’s say a cat is what it is supposed to look like.
If the BBC were desperate for something to touch base with the LGBTQ+ agitprop industry – as they forever are – they could have left in Bigwig’s trans-species obsession with Kehaar from the book, not swapped it out for Bluebell behaving as if he’s got a gay crush on Blackberry. The gull’s role is pivotal in the book, in this version the producers appeared clueless what to do with the character. Peter Capaldi’s och-aye-the-noo-up-yer-cottontails-Jimmy porridge kitsch Kehaar – not quite as dreadful as the late Rik Mayell’s comedy Kehaar for the ITV version, but bad nevertheless – as least shows consistency in that everything this man touches these days is doomed to turn to hraka.
Let’s not even go into the deviations from the story – the stupidity of which is encapsulated by cutting out anything from the original which may result in anyone complaining it left them ‘triggered’ yet adding in new parts which merely highlight how poor the CGI animation is, including a fight with a murder of crows in an abandoned church (the idea taken from the ‘offstage’ rats in the barn battle from the book and 1979 film) – the visuals may look 2018, but the movements look Minecraft.
Worst of all, and what becomes steadily more jarring as the films go on, if you watch the remake, the foliage does not move – basic computer game standard animation now regarded as essential for immersion. The water and rivers looks good, but this is about all you can say for it. It’s almost a metaphor for the whole show – Water It Down.
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