Sim-O

1. Did ITV2 have a hand in Peter Andre and Katie Prices’ split?

   Think about it. The couple have a successful (for ITV2) fly-on-the-wall documentary series on ITV2. ITV gets it’s revenue from advertising. Why have the audience watching one programme about these two muppets when they could be watching two?

2. Why does the hair on your head (and face if you’re a bloke) just keep growing?

   Why does the hair on your legs/arms/pubes have hair that grows to a certain length and then stop?

I recently saw James Camerons’ Avatar. I thought it was quite good. Excellent special effects and CGI, as we’ve come to expect nowadays, an interesting story, based of the age old line of good vs evil with the underdog winning the day. And, of course, the 3D effects which are sooo much better than the old generation of 3D which was always a bit dodgy and, frankly, used in films that weren’t particularly good in 2D stuffed with moments that were in the film purely to show of the 3D. Avatars 3D is a lot subtler and is more about giving depth to the scene rather than having something lunge at you from the cinema screen.

After the film I expressed my view in a rather shorter version of the above via Twitter and Dnotice replied asking if I had read the Sp!ked review of the film. I must confess I hadn’t.

I have now, though.

Steve Bemner reckons Cameron has taken…

misanthropic perspective to a whole new level of anti-humanism. Its main character, and hero, is so alienated from humanity that he literally disowns his own species. This move requires Cameron to indulge in and reproduce some of the most backward and anti-human development prejudices of our age

I’m not going to give you a bit of background to the story of Avatar, as you either know it already or you can read James’ Sp!iked piece for it. But here is why James’ thinks that James Cameron is a self-hating human. I reckon Steve is reading far too much in to this film and needs to relax a little.

In order for the audience to be persuaded that it is legitimate for one human to join another species and begin to kill fellow humans, Cameron indulges in several fictional conceits that draw upon modern misanthropy. First, the miners and their mercenaries embark upon genocide with no thought whatsoever, despite the fact that humanity has considered genocidal behaviour to be a bad thing for some time now. This allows Avatar to imply that man has not changed since the explorations and conquests of the Middle Ages. There is even a fairly explicit suggestion that the humans are acting in the same way that the settlers of America did and that the Na’vi, whose main weapons are bows and arrows, are equivalent to Native Americans. Here, humanity is depicted as having learnt nothing from the past and as being inherently savage towards that which it does not instantly understand.

Right. First off, if you lump every body on this planet together you could claim that humanity might consider genocide to be bad behaviour, but there are little pockets here and there around the world today, and in recent history that think that genocide is the best thing to get what they want. There is also, still, companies about that think nothing of exploitation of the local resources [.pdf] and people.

Humans, or more specifically the majority of those with any sort of power, do behave in a way that is not dissimilar to settlers and conquistadors. ‘We’ want something from a people that is less powerful than us, ‘we’ try to persuade them to our way of thinking and the people ‘we’ want something from doesn’t or can’t give it to us we go in with the guns. Case in point, Iraq. If the coalition had a chance of getting their butts kicked, the military option would never have been on the cards. In Avatar, if the Na’vi had bigger guns than the humans instead of bows and arrows, the humans would negotiated a hell of a lot harder and longer.

The film focuses on one company. One company that behaves badly in a certain way. That doesn’t imply that the whole of the human race are like that. There are probably all sorts of people with all sorts of characteristics employed with the company, but the film only focuses on a certain group of them.

Second, the Na’vi are depicted as living in an essentially harmonious tribal society. Their society is depicted as a primitive kind of utopia in which all the individuals within it know their role and social conflict does not exist. A central idea of the film is that they also live in literal harmony with the planet, a harmony that the humans, of course, destroy. In its depiction of the life of the aliens we see a kind of green fantasy of how human life should be: primitive technology, a hierarchy in which everyone knows their place, a community at the mercy of the environment. This is also a kind of Western primitivism that advances racially demeaning stereotypes of happy natives living in harmony with the environment, when, in reality, tribal society is much more brutal, and much less harmonious and fulfilling, than those who celebrate it are willing to admit.

The Na’vi society may be depicted as essentially harmonious, but how different is it to other primitive societies, here on Earth? There are tribes in the Amazon that live in harmony with the environment. They take what they need, they do not hunt animals just for the hell of it. Hunting takes energy and time when all you have is spears and arrows. Why waste that effort killing stuff that you’re not going to use? The primitive tribes ‘listen’ to the jungle, they know how it works, when to leave plants alone, where to find certain foods. How is that different to the Na’vi?

The Na’vi also showed that they’re are not all peace and harmony, too. When the Jake and the girl Na’vi (I’ve forgotten the Na’vi names. Sorry) admit that they have mated, the chap that she was going to be partnered with shows jealousy and a fight ensues between him and Jake. This shows that the Na’vi feel the same emotions as everybody else. How many of the other Na’vi are happy with their place in society? We don’t know. Just like every other society the Na’vi are forget their differences and become unified against the threat. What we see is a snapshot of a certain time period. Who knows what happened before the time period of the film, but there are clues there that the Na’vi society operates just like any other.

Cameron’s third conceit is that the planet Pandora has a consciousness. This is necessary in order to show why such a primitive society survives when, in reality, it would likely perish given the potential hostility of the environment depicted in the film. This idea reflects the green notion of Gaia: that is, the belief that all beings are connected into one consciousness and that harm to one being harms the organic whole. The film makes this idea even more explicit with the aliens being able to physically link their minds with the animals and plants of the planet. The humans, meanwhile, are depicted as blundering into, and threatening, this ecological paradise like some kind of inter-planetary plague.

Why is Pandoras’ conciousness necessary for the Na’vi to survive? Why would they perish if they couldn’t ‘plug-in’? Why is Pandora any more hostile than say, the Australian Outback? The Australian Aborigines have been living in the middle of a desert with, on the surface of it, nothing there. With a sun beating down so strong that it can cook eggs. The Aborigines’ can’t just plug themselves into the landscape yet they have been living in that place for millennia by ‘listening’ to their surroundings. The Aboriginal society went down hill rapidly when Europeans appeared on the scene bringing with them tobacco, alcohol, disease and animals that upset the local ecology not to mention what the Europeans did in terms of denying the Aboriginals rights and access to their land and the civil society that was growing up around them. “The humans, meanwhile, are depicted as blundering into, and threatening, this ecological paradise like some kind of inter-planetary plague.” That sounds about right to me.

In fact, this is no specific critique – instead it portrays all humanity as destructive.

No it doesn’t. It shows that a company and people can be destructive. It shows that with no checks and balances capitalism will do what it can to take what it wants. After all, did anyone in the film say ‘Hey, you can’t do that. I’m going to report you to the authorities’? No, because presumably there are none out in space.

This bleak portrait does serve a purpose: only by making humanity uniformly destructive, and the Na’vi holy, can Cameron justify the final conclusion of the film, in which the hero abandons humanity altogether to join the Na’vi.

The final conclusion, for me anyway, wasn’t that the hero turned his back on humanity. Jake became a Na’vi to be fully and completely with the one he loved. He didn’t have the use of his legs and to stay with the Na’vi and his love, he would’ve had to have worn the facemask and been, basically and burden to them. There was a spare Na’vi body and a way of getting his conciousness into, then why not. Avatar finishes on a positive tone for love, not a negative blast at humanity.

By the end of the film, this reviewer felt like rising to his feet and cheering the final human attack on the Na’vi.

Oh, I see, Steve wants’ to see the destruction of the Na’vi because they’re so bloody nice and make us all look like horrid bullies.

Indeed, much of the audience seemed ambivalent – we were clearly dazzled by the spectacular 3D effects and the beautiful rendering of the alien planet, but the unrelentingly bleak portrayal of humanity left everyone more than a little despondent as we left the cinema to celebrate the New Year.

Despondent after two and a half hours of unrelentingly being shown humans are shits? I could believe that if it was a film based on a true story or a documentary, but not such an obvious work of fiction. I never got that feeling from with the audience I watched it with.

Steve Bremner seems to think that just because a film focuses on certain events and certain people that the director is trying to say that everything is like that. That is wrong. The film was two and a half hours long, which some people think it is already to long (it was too long after half an hour in the crappy cinema seats we were sat in). How long would Avatar have been if James Cameron had to show the cuddly, caring side of humans and the “much more brutal, and much less harmonious and fulfilling” side of Na’vi life?

The worlds fattest man, a Mr Mason is going to write a dieting book. I guessing it’s gonna be a short one that goes something like…

1. Stop eating 20,000 calories a day
2. Get gastric band fitted

Get a fucking grip, people. Please…

A post by a user called Elequin expresses an almost obsessive relationship with the film.

“That’s all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about ‘Avatar.’ I guess that helps. It’s so hard I can’t force myself to think that it’s just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na’vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie,” Elequin posted.

A user named Mike wrote on the fan Web site “Naviblue” that he contemplated suicide after seeing the movie.

“Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it,” Mike posted. “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.’ “

via Anorak

I installed a network drive at home the other day.

The instructions said plug it it and then switch it on. So I did.

To get your XP/Vista machine to see it:

1. Boot up computer
2. insert supplied CD into computer and start it up
3. double click and install an application
4. open newly installed application
5. If you want to map the network drive manually or automatically?
6. fuck about for a while and then in the morning get screamed at by Mrs -O and sent out to die on the snowy roads of hell because laptop has mysteriously lost all it’s internet connections which are needed for Mrs -O to work from home.
7. Call company tech support to fix laptop
8. Leave laptop alone for fear of having my testicles cut off and stuffed in my ears

The procedure to get my Mac to recognise the drive is as follows:

1. turn on Mac

I wish Mrs -Os’ work laptop was a Mac.

Daniel Hoffman-Gill, a chap who comments here, has a new show. It’s called Poles Apart…

Officially 600,000 Polish people have come to Britain to seek work since 2004. Two British lads (Dan & Mark) are reversing the trend and trying to get work in Warsaw, Poles Apart is their story.

This unique show about a 2000 mile adventure from the U.K to Poland following the journey thousands of Polish people have made over the last 70 years. Poles Apart is the story of two nations who have fought together, worked together and now live together.

This innovative show brings Hard Graft’s unique blend of entertaining comedy storytelling to help us all understand what it means to be an immigrant in the World today.

You can get more info and watch a couple of trailers for it here and here.

Go on. Treat yourself.

This blogs old home was called Sim-O’s Random Thoughts. It hasn’t been too random for a while, although you might disagree, but here’s three random thoughts…

1. Why the fuck do people put why they bought something on a review?
   Ok, sometimes it’s relevant, like with a camera, “I bought it to keep in my pocket, not for serious stuff’, but why for a freeview box?

   I bought it for my daughter because she works shifts.

   It’s a freeview box = you want to watch freeview TV.
   It’s got a hard disk drive = you want to record freeview TV.
   It doesn’t add anything to the review. We don’t need to know and frankly, don’t give a shit. Just stick to how fucking well the fucking thing works.

2. Women. They won’t walk around the town centre in just their underwear but will wear on a beach in front of hundreds of people, for all intents and purposes, just that.
   Why? What’s the difference?
3. You can drive at 17. Something that can so easily kill people if you’re not careful.
   You are legally allowed to have sex, and so create a whole new life, with all the responsibilities and ramifications that that brings with it, at 16.
   You are not allowed to drink or smoke, which is basically poisoning yourself, until you’re 18.
   Why?

via Ration Geekery

Erm. Just a quick post.

Can all these people making and watching these fucking reality TV programmes just stop it. Just fucking stop it.

Enough if enough. I don’t give two shits about someone trying to move house or renovate a house. It’s been done to death.

That bloody dinner party programme on channel four or wife swap. Fuck off. you were interesting for about two programmes and then you ran out of different types of people to put together that would annoy the crap out of each other.

Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum. Never mind programme makers, or the kids that are featured on the bloody thing, it’s the parents! “Oh, yes dear. Lets go on a programme that takes the piss out of you and shows what a useless spoilt turd you are.” It’s you, parents, that is showing that you should’ve been sterilised with a fence post! You made the little cunts like they are. Stop it!

If you’re married or are a partner to someone who makes these programmes or wants to appear on one of these freak shows, have a word. If that doesn’t work I’ve got a shiney sword you can borrow to push in brain via their ear. That should stop them.

And another thing. Just because you start running out of ordinary attention seeking fuckwits doesn’t mean that putting the word ‘celebrity’ in the title doesn’t make the programme ‘fresh again. Someone who was in a paper once because she snogged someone that was in a soap opera for ten minutes or an old cunt that was on the telly all the time in the seventies for an unfathamable reason and the overvoice needs to remind us how they are famous every time their name is mentioned and don’t know when to give it up are not famous. Their wankers.

And those cretins that are only known for being on other reality shows are not celebrities. They’re, they’re… they’re lucky no cunt’s punched them in the face with a Scania.

Then there’s the police ones. They wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t any moralising in them. We know it’s wrong to steal cars. We know that riding a scooter without a helmet while of your box on extasy with your prostitute mother hanging on the back trying to jack up is going to end in a big heap with blood everywhere.
Shut the fuck up and show the fucking car chases. And not the shitty one of a drunk bloke riding a bloody pedal bike at 2 miles an hour, either.

Cunts.

The final instalments today. I hope you enjoyed it.

Parts 16 through to 21.