Totes.rand()
The original inspiration, based on south-siders’ inherent desire to shorten words like “totally” and “random”.

function AreYe (havinalaugh){ der bud; return true;}
“Are ye havin a laugh” typically means “are you taking the piss?”… while “bud” is colloquially used for “friend”, often in a derogatory sense!

willYaMeetMeMate(bool);
Another Dublinism is guys asking girls if they’ll “meet” (make out with) their friends. Obviously… Irish people are too shy to ask themselves!

I also noted that boolean statements should be handled by a class called stateOfYe()!

What about catch statements?…
would_ye_ever { } ye_can_fuck_off (Bollix e) {}

Thanks @agammell and @sciritai for the lulz!

Of course, as usual, legislators, elected officials and “interest groups” are caving and trying to force the people into something they (we) don’t want. SOPA was defeated because people put pressure on congress in the US to shelve the plans. Now ACTA has raised its ugly head because it was in development through secret meetings with politicians spurred on by special interest groups and businesses.

The reason it’s all remarkably ironic is because during a tour of Berlin we were pointed to the Reichstag, which is essentially the house of the government.

There’s a large, glass dome on top for visitors to check out the building. Even while the government is sitting and having debates, etc. It’s a cool concept. Not because it’s an iconic piece of architecture (which it is), but because of the message it holds. The architect built it this way to demonstrate a very real idea: the people are above the government. In this building, the people look down through glass to see the government in action.

True democracy does not involve the people electing people with agendas. True democracy involves electing people to uphold the peoples’ beliefs. Just because you’re elected, it does not give you a mandate to do as you please without the peoples’ input.

No one wants ACTA. It’s counter-productive to stoping copyright infringement. It’ll only spur on stronger, better and harder-to-trace software. When Metallica & the music industry stood behind a war against Napster, torrents came. Can you imagine what would come after torrents? And don’t for a second think that the people wouldn’t start their own ISP’s and network infrastructures to get around ACTA/SOPA types of restrictions.

The arab spring came about thanks, in part, to the organisational abilities the internet gave the people. It’s the spirit of this sharing, connection and community that embodies the internet. Bad things happen online, like illegal downloading – but as I linked above, if it wasn’t downloaded, it probably wouldn’t have been experienced in the first place (that is to say that I wouldn’t have paid for something anyway if I couldn’t have downloaded it).

I can’t imagine the anger if the internet was suppressed in the way they want to. It’s the voice of the people they’re trying to silence, not the copyright. It suits the government(s) to say that copyright and child porn is rampant and killing the economy – but that’s all a fallacy. In fact, the child porn argument is the most annoying argument I have ever heard. I’ve been using the internet since I was about 10 or 11, and not once, ever, have I seen child porn. I’ve never looked for it, but who in their right mind is?

Ultimately my point is that the government needs to represent the will of the people. There is no mandate for any government to try and shut down or change the way we use the internet. If ISP’s get tough then people leave them (just look at the state of Eircom, who bend over backwards for anyone). If ISP’s are forced to report my IP for merely visiting thepiratebay or similar, then it might be time to invest in private networks – for the people – outside of the governments’ jurisdiction.

The story
In the company I work for, a large portion of the business is comprised of a retail element. I’m not directly involved in this part of the business, but the aim of the business generally is to drive customers through the doors of the retail floors. The business sells Apple computers – generally perceived to be higher cost computers than your low-grade tack from other manufacturers.

The other day I had a few meetings in one of the locations, where we have retail space and offices above. I spent most of my day in the offices above other than having a chat with some of the staff downstairs. After I was done myself and one of my colleagues went for a pint. This is where I heard the story…

Keep in mind it wasn’t told with any malice or even slight anger – but more bewilderment. I certainly was blown away by the audacity of the characters involved.

In Dublin we have, like most other major global cities, an “occupy” movement. The aim is to highlight and force change in capitalist regimes with corrupt banking systems, etc. You can read more about that on Wikipedia, if you don’t already know what it is. Here, our version of the movement is a make-shift tent/wood arena outside of the Central Bank of Ireland on Dame Street. Hence the name generally given to it is “Occupy Dame Street“.

Some of the campaigners, who appear generally to be fairly quiet and non-confrontational (it must be pointed out) dropped into the retail store in question. They wanted to know from the manager if it was possible to get a Mac from the store to use during their campaign. The clear answer here is generally going to be “no”, as the company has its own quiet charitable efforts that it does and it’s certainly never donated machines to political efforts. Nor will it ever, I would imagine. This isn’t a huge company with vast coffers of money to throw around, so dropping €900+ (the cheapest Mac price) on the Occupy movement makes no business sense. It’s easier to just have people employed for that price instead.

Instead, the manager decided to see if he could get his hands on a second-hand machine. Sure, it’ll be old, a bit rusty and won’t have up-to-date software – but it’ll do the simple things fine. Word processing, internet, email/browser, etc.

This is where the story gets a bit strange. The manager didn’t manage to release this stock. Probably for the same reasons he couldn’t release a new machine either – because it’s not worth the business risk. The problem here is that no one dropped around to the Occupy movement HQ to tell them. They decided to get angry. And when protestors get angry, they shout.

A few of them decided to take it upon themselves to drop into the retail store (when it was quiet, apparently) and chanted that the company was “part of the problem”. Once they had vented their anger they went off and were never heard of again.

This is where my opinion comes in. These guys went into a place asking for some of the most expensive computer equipment you can buy, and then kicked up a stink when they didn’t get it. In essence, they threw their toys out of the pram when Daddy wouldn’t buy them a new Spiderman outfit. I don’t know how they could justify asking for a Mac from a small business that employes a lot of people (but, remember, is “part of the problem”). Everyone in their is doing their bit to help themselves by earning a wage, paying tax and getting on with it. How they are the problem is ridiculous.

Did these guys consider going to a skip or a huge business that might have old computers waiting to be binned? Was their first port-of-call the fancy Apple stuff? I wouldn’t even mind that they asked. Sometimes when you chance your arm you can be surprised by the reaction… but to demand/expect that you get what you want for free is ridiculous – and symptomatic of the middle class Irish rich-kid attitude that these guys displayed.

I’m no more happy with the Irish banking/political system as anyone else. It irritates me that the super-rich get away with blind murder and rape of the state, but I’m just getting on with it like most other people. Things like this make the Occupy Dame Street movement look more like the children of “the 1%” than anything else. I also find a great sense of irony that their camp on Dame Street is ring-fenced. It’s not an open peoples movement because you can’t just park yourself next to them. I’m sure there are security issues involved, but those issues wouldn’t be there if there were more people behind this movement.

I wasn’t necessarily against this movement before, but I certainly am now. When can we get this shanty-town shut down?

Christmas was lovely because all I did was go back to my parents’ house and drink their wine while eating their food. Once I had gained enough weight I left. A nice quiet Christmas was what I wanted and needed… and it was certainly what I got.

New Year’s was another thing altogether where myself & Gem went out and got messy. We hadn’t done it in a while and owed it to ourselves to drive our bodies into the ground. The single and only resolution I made for myself was to part-take in project365; an idea I saw a lot of people do last year and the year before that. Basically you just upload a single image per day that you shot and edited that day. I’d love to say I’ll be dragging my 50D around with me everywhere but I reckon a lot of images will come off my iPhone… which is fine. However it has inspired me to look at the world like a photographer again – to think about framing, colours, people, etc.

The 5th is my birthday so after a quick turn-around after 2012 rang in I had more celebrations. This time much more subdued, just a few pints with friends and that was that. I also decided that after pining for one for so long, I would buy myself a Christmas gift with a Kindle 4. So far I’m loving it but I haven’t properly delved into reading on it yet because I have a real physical book to finish first.

Ideally now would be the time to get back into the swing of things but no – on Wednesday I go on holiday to Berlin for 7 days.

I’ll update this blog a bit more once I get a chance but so far things are going swimmingly in 2012!

• You do not talk about the Bechdel test
• You do not talk about the Bechdel test
• If it’s your first night at film school, you have to fight

These aren’t the exact rules. In fact these are the rules related to when a man (for example, me) brings up how much bullshit is associated with the actual rules. The actual rules are:

• A film must include two women (at least)
• These two women have to talk to each other
• The conversation has to be about something other than men

These rules seem easy to follow, and should be easy to find a film that follow these rules. However, think about it… there are very few films I can think of that follow these rules.

The rules aren’t meant to be feministic or anti-men, either. They’re simply a barometer for how half of the worlds population are treated by one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the modern era.

Alien passes this test, as does Aliens (or Alien 2, for the retards). This is a good example. It features a strong female lead, and even other women… some of which converse with Ripley about something that isn’t a man! Amazing. But apply these same rules to The Stepford Wives and it still passes. While Stepford tries to be social commentary, I watched it and thought it was grossly anti-women and clearly written by a man with an attitude problem. Boys Don’t Cry passes too. I don’t think I need to go into why this is a ridiculous example of why this is a highlight for the test.

Apply this same rule to games and, even though I can find plenty of games with strong female characters, often they don’t have other females to talk to about anything other than men. Uncharted… for example. There are incredibly strong women but I’m not sure if they talk together about much else other than Nathan Drake. I don’t actually remember if Lara Croft had female friends, too.

What does this say?

Well, women will tell you that it says that women are grossly under-represented in film. I would agree. But anything after that sentence will lead anyone to believe that all women are crazy, politically minded, feminist anarchists who hate men and anything men do.

I disagree with that last bit and think that it shows one thing and one thing only: not that women are grossly under-represented in film, but that men are the main source of entertainment in the world. Men write and direct more films than women. I think with game developers, if a woman walks into a developer office she’ll light up in a ball of flames like a satanist in a church.
(my girlfriend told me to note here that I mean that I doubt women work in game development studios)

What’s the problem? And what’s the solution?

The problem is that the film industry is like banks. It’s run by bottom-feeding pieces of dirt who favour nepotism over talent. There are millions, literally millions, of talented women who belong at the upper-echelons of entertainment. Particularly at the writing and idea side of things. I’m sure they would write strong female characters that talk about things other than men easily as long as they didn’t feel inhibited by the rules of film.

The fact is men don’t even notice when two woman are in a film. Not in a negative way. In fact, I think in a positive way. If there were 15 women in a film it would be fine as long as it doesn’t scream “I’M A WOMAN, HEAR ME TALK ABOUT THINGS THAT AREN’T MEN”… The film industry plays to rules that don’t matter to most people. Women are only out of place in gay porn and Batman (largely the same thing) and that’s fine, men are out of place in clothes shops and decent restaurants.

The solution? Same as my solution for banks. Dissolve them. Not the institutions, the people who run them… in baths of acid. Then start again with young, modern, crazy, new age thinkers. It’s those young, crazy, new-age thinkers that brought the technological revolution we’re enjoying today. Why not the entertainment revolution? It needs a kick in the ass anyway. The fact that some gimp decided that a comic book-to-film adaptation of The Green Lantern was a good idea is a prime example of why we need to be stocking up on human-dissolving acid already…

I’m not talking about quotas, that’s more anti-women than anything else. I’m just saying that on the face of it the bechdel test stinks of feminism, and that drives men away from an idea. Ideas drive men towards ideas. Old fucks who sign off on The Green Lantern stink anyway, which is a clear sign that women aren’t under-represented in film as much as they’re just not given a shot at showing talent in an equal auditorium.

A previous winner of the competition (because that’s all it is, the pursuit of fame rather than the pursuit of artistic expression, while we sit at home in our living rooms laughing – and drinking) decided to make a surprise appearance at the final episode of the competition, presumably because she has an album due soon.

To express some emotion and show her 12-year-old fanbase that she’s still relevant, she decided to cover Hurt by Johnny Cash Nine Inch Nails.

Let me be the first one to say that I’m a huge lifelong fan of NIN. Even the worst NIN track (hint: it doesn’t exist) is unmeasurably better than anything anyone from X Factor can do. Partially because NIN tracks were written by people with emotion powering their desire to get creative.

For those not in the know, Hurt is a track that appears on the NIN album that introduced me to the band, The Downward Spiral. Now, most people who listen to real music knows that this album is special – even if you weren’t into the industrial stuff at the time. People who listen to real music and have listened to this album knows that Hurt is the final crescendo on that album. The song before it is the title track. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand what a drug infested, pain riddled and emotionally unstable Trent Reznor might have been going through when those two tracks ended an album that spurred on fame and his eventual clean up (both emotionally and physically). I don’t see it as a coincidence that the 10 year anniversary version of the album had a “clean” version of Hurt that made the track a bit simpler by removing the industrial under-tone that lined the entire track originally.

Track forward to 2011 and some dink who goes to a rehearsal studio is told she’s covering Johnny Cash’s last hurrah, Hurt. Good call Louis Cowell, or whomever handles the trivial PR stuff like what song to sing.

If you watch the performance (and that’s all it really is) you can see all the emotion spilling from the red dressed simple girl from England. It’s tear inducing how real her emotions are as she sings someone elses lyrics. You can tell she feels every single bit of the pain and anguish. She knows that shoving a needle into her skin is something she feels she needs but ultimately will kill her. She’s in pain.

These are the kinds of emotions you often see in films. With actors. Another word for it is: pretending.

The performance is so contrived it’s irritating me to the point where I actually had to write over 500 words (so far) on it.

It’s this kind of shit that has the music industry gasping for air. Instead of giving creative freedom to creative types the industry is more interested in butchering older, well known ish (to the pop loving kids) tracks so that the vague recollection of the song is dulled by the new cover of it enough to make it feel original to a 15 year old.

The problem is that some Dad, uncle or older brother is going to bring their kid or relative to a Leona Lewis concert and she’s going to pour all that fake emotion into Hurt at the end of her set. The Dad will remember the first time he heard that track at the end of an incredibly moving album. He’s going to see the contrived look on this dink’s face on stage and just go apeshit, murdering everyone in his general vicinity. Then he’ll go home and listen to The Fragile to make himself feel better.

Thank god there’s still creative people out there, and thank god Trent Reznor is doing more NIN material next year.

There’s a definite cold snap on its way – you can feel the snow coming in your bones. You can also see Christmas around the corner with sales, lights, decorated windows and trees in homes.

I just recently moved to a new apartment with a lovely big living room (two, kind of) so my housemates decided to get active and put up their fake Christmas tree and some lights.

The tree has fake snow already on it which is kind of sparkly on its own. Dave, my housemate, pointed out that when it comes down the scene left behind is akin to the murder of a pixie.

The panoramic living room

Interestingly I’ve done no shopping yet. I know one of the people I have to buy for, and that’s it. Most presents I buy these days are through Kris Kringle events, whereby everyone puts their name into a hat, gets a budget and buys gifts for each other. Only once have I been involved where no budget was involved and it was a disaster. I splashed out on Beats for someone while I got back the equivalent of €10 trinkets. Never again will I get involved where there’s no budget set out…

Shopping is always a problem at Christmas. If I were better organised I would probably have bought everything online a month ago. It’s difficult to buy online now because there’s an inherent risk of not receiving gifts on time! The option of buying in bricks-and-mortar stores is also rough because it’s just so unbelievably busy these days! Though my new apartment is so remarkably central it’s difficult not to find a slot in the day when it’s quiet and run around to buy random gifts.

Grafton Street

I’m not too much of a scrooge. I like Christmas and the holiday time of year. I just hate the people around it. People end up being very narky, cranky and moany at this time of year. Moaning about traffic from your car isn’t productive… considering if you’re in a car you are the traffic. The same goes for queues in shops… you are the queue! Dealing with those people are the real problem from my perspective.

It’s excellently done, and was a nice way to break in my new apartment.

It’s there that I will wax lyrical about technology, much in the same way I wax lyrical about games on shoryuken.ie.

The domain is projectdeathstar.net and while it’s quite a slick custom theme, being custom it’s likely to have a lot of bugs and errors. If you could get in touch (via twitter preferably) to let me know of any glitches you notice that would be great!

Don’t forget to add the RSS feed to your preferred choice of RSS aggregator

I’ll rectify that as soon as possible. In the meantime, enjoy this image of my new home office setup…