MonsterBook

There’s a lot of talk about Primark’s padded bikini and how it was aiming for the Paedophile Pound, a mythical nonce currency coined by child protection bandwagoneer Shy Keenan. It’s obviously outrageous and disgusting, won’t somebody think of the children, decay of society, etc., but it’s missing one major point about paedophiles: They are sexually aroused by children. Think about it. Can you see the fallacy?

Beware the beach, there may be paedos hiding there!

All of a sudden, there was a whole new section in Waterstones. A new type of book. It had obviously cut a limb off the bloated sci-fi and fantasy section and took it for its own. The new genre had staked its claim, it was here to stay.

Waterstones called it PAINFUL LIVES
(continue reading…)

Yeah, you heard me. This not my hole – nothing fits.

As you may have noticed I’ve been a bit quiet lately. I’ve been away in Glasgow getting my new flat, and since I’ve been back I’ve been either working on the freelance commitments, or packing my gear for removals next month. Herein, lies the problem…

This is the way it goes with box packing. You get up one morning and set up the first box. With me it’s either rpg books, or dvds.

The first box or two go swimmingly, because for some reason they always do. Everything fits like bloody tetris and you think ‘aw man, I’m going to breeze this’ as you look up at the substantial  dent you’ve put the packing.

Then… comes the graphic novels, and the ‘bits’. All the stuff that simply won’t go together. Yeah, Dave … this is what you get for buying those daft european comics that are all different sizes, and hardback. Then it’s onwards to staplers, desk toys, the odd shaped Magic promo box Wizards sent me last year. In complete reverse of the Amigara Fault, nothing fits in the way it should. You literally spend double the time on things that have little or no consequence in your day to day life. The only reason you’re here now is that everything has to leave the premises in three weeks.

Receipts, printed documents and reference pictures lie ahead of me. Joy.

Dava

Well, actually not really. Vomiting is something filmmakers tend to gloss over, have you ever noticed this? When (insert drunk/disgusted character) has to hurl one up on screen the director usually hand feeds them a few spoonfuls of porridge, and gets them it spit it out at the appropriate moment. Or it’s the dry heaves against a wall.

Why? – oh Dave, nobody bothers with this, why would anyone actively want to watch proper vomming on screen?

Well, maybe because we’re aiming for realism? It’s alright to have a character’s head explode digitally, casting eyeballs outward, and exposing brain tissue. But nobody in the effects department wants to sit in front of their mac and composite the fountain of spew that erupts from the mouth once we’ve all had a skinfull. We’re obviously far too delicate for this sort of thing….

We demand genuine, carrot ladden, sweetcorn ridden Spew!

Dava

Update: 2010-03-25. Since I wrote this diatribe, further documented scandals have been revealed in Germany, South America, Holland, Austria and again in the United States. How this can be anything but sanctioned institutional behaviour is beyond me. It’s past time. Stop treating these institutions as moral arbiters or as having any more right to tell us what to do than secular institutions. They don’t believe in punishment for sins; why should you?

One thing is clear in the latest scandals involving the Catholic Church and its stance of tolerance towards paedophilia: They believe there is no god. There is no way that an organisation can support the rape of children in its care with such nonchalance and still uphold a belief in hell or purgatory. No-one fearing an afterlife of torment, fire and brimstone would threaten parents of abused children into silence or would simply move a child-rapist from one hunting ground to another, over and over.

Sanctuary?