Why Katy Perry's "Part of Me" is terrible (the video, at any rate)

It’s not something that really needs to be explained, there are bigger beasts in this world to hunt, but here I am anyway. Part of Me, for those of you who hate Katy Perry, is a song about a woman whose boyfriend cheats on her so she confronts him in his office and decides to join the marines. Before she does that she defiles her body by cutting off her hair and strapping her breasts, apparently as a reaction to being cheated on. Why is she strapping her breasts anyway? This isn’t Boys Don’t cry, she’s joining the Marines based on a poster entitled “The Woman’s Marines”, that’s a pretty big indicator that strapping your breasts is totally redundant. I can handle her strive for independence and a need to seize power and find a confidence in herself… by becoming just like every other soldier around her. Hey, if she’d introduced a knee into her cheating ex’s balls at the beginning it would have been a short song, I get that. But here it is. It’s the constant flashbacks. She’s doing press-ups, pushing herself to be the best that she can be, and she trivialises it by reminding us that her sole motivation is she got cheated on. She can’t act for herself, it’s all about a giant “screw you” to the ex, who probably banged the hell out of that office clerk he was not-so-inconspicuously having relations with… by a huge glass window… presumably in a town his girlfriend lives in. Even at the end, as she goes to mow down some people, she’s still got that “and look at me now” look. Yeah, you showed him. Well done, doesn’t seem petty at all. “Hey, just going to join the Marines. Why? Oh, my mom just told me my room was a mess, I’m livid. I don’t need clothes, just a pair of scissors to mangle my hair and a picture of the family to burn when I’m almost finished training. Cya, Dad.”

My Trip to the Library

Something I rarely experience is my almost obsessive organisation of something. In this case, something is coursework. All of it. So I decide, seeing the messy mismatched folders, that I will take them all out of their respective folders and staple them all ready for placement in larger folders.

One problem.

Some of the pieces of coursework are 60 pages thick. You know what staples 60 pages? Not my goddamn stapler, that’s what. Those staples just crumbled like bitches without even penetrating a page. Picture the scene from Superman with the bullet.

Anyway, I decide – you know what, fuck you, paper, I’m going to win this war. So I set off for the library, at twenty to eleven because the library is open until midnight. No wait, that’s Monday to Thursday, because they are bastards.

Not wanting to waste a journey, I move to the LINC hoping to find the fabled industrial stapler of legend. Unfortunately, Edge Hill have this awkward security system that requires your student card. I have no fucking clue where my student card is. It could be in a storm drain for all I know.

Anyway, I see a girl in there. Just one, and knock on the window loud enough for her to take off her headphones. She soundlessly opens the door, lets me in, I thank her. And then I realise there are no staplers here. The trusting staff of the LINC building have locked them away for the night in case somebody tries to feed them after midnight or gets them wet or some shit.

But here lies the problem: I have just inconvenienced a fellow student, and now I’m obliged to stay for 10 minutes so as to not have wasted her time. Not to worry though, I’ve found a forgotten pendrive, and e-mail the poor owner telling them I am going to smash it with a rock.

Actually, I send them a message promising it to be handed in tomorrow in the library. That’s right, I’m now committed to a journey based on a finding during an obligation to somebody located in a place I would not have frequented had the fucking library bothered to have a Monday-Friday service.

Next time I need a stapler, I’m going to just break in, and steal five. Because fuck you.

New Passport

Being as I need to leave the country soon, customs requires me to have a passport that didn't expire in 2009. It also helps to not have a 10 year old picture of yourself looking like a generic child in a Carbini hoodie.

After paying an unlubricated anal molestation fee, I was promised my identity, with picture pre-Deliverance would take ten working days. To their squeal-like-a-pig-boy credit, they did it in 9 days. And then I noticed. It's not waterproof. Your picture, which was previously and wisely laminated, is now completely open to the elements. Now I need to go to the effort of airtight bagging my passport, for it will surely melt at the lightest drop of precipitation. Better yet would be if it did get wet while I was out of the country, they might not let me leave. Hooray for steps backward. I hear the government has plans to make new cars with a stone cylinder for front wheels and get gambling addicts to drive them.

And, even better than the dive into the twenties (I'm not even sure they didn't laminate as early as that), if your passport gets smeared, then you need to pay for a new one. A brand new, £95 passport, which is equally smearable. Well played, customs, well played. Should I ever have my family murdered and find the guy who did it, I'll send him to you to get a passport, it's much worse than what prison would do to him.

Freshers Freshers everywhere and no PC's in the LINC

They're an army. I was one once, but I retired, or rather got promoted. And I swear they're getting more stupid (edited: stupider). Freshers. Even the name is stupid. Most freshers are fine; I'm an unjustifiably elitist douche (edited: douché), but I have not had the greatest experience of the "new breed".

In the LINC,(and because I have forgot the real acronym it is now)the Learning Information Networking Centre, you can go to print work if the library computer (edited: computers) is in use. Which it invariably is as there are usually over a thousand students just walking around campus. At the LINC, in the half hour window I had to print off an essay, I found myself stood in a roomfull of occupied computers. No, that isn't right, it was a roomful of occupied or broken computers. Obviously, those computers were being put to good use, students utilising the only available computers in university to - wait for it - read the comment section for youtube videos. Granted by "students" I meant "skinhead guy in green shirt with too much Lynx on", but even one person, wasting a computer, not even watching the video, with the sound off, reading the comments is enough. It's not like the rest of the room were busy, half the people were on Facebook, which is something I've done myself, and the rest were actually doing work. Youtube comment sections? We should just gather the mob now and lynch him. Waste of space.

Anyway, let's move on to the basis for my broad sweeping statements. After finally securing a computer that actually worked and didn't just advertise L:39 Radio, I printed off my essay, and was sat next to the computer, and so was able to bat the sports student's hand away from my work and collect it. Next I printed my bibliography. Oh wait, no, I didn't, because the sports student was still stood there waiting for her work. Mine did not print. I opened up the print queue, the most useful improvement I've seen Edgehill implement this year, and looked at the queue. There, right above my 87kb bibliography was what I assumed to be her file. The .pdf file. The 230mb pdf file. How the fuck do you get a 230mb .pdf file that's 18 pages long? That makes no sense. And the worst thing was, she'd sent it to the printer, via the network, 10 minutes ago, and it was halfway through.

After sharing an exasperated glance with the technician who was changing the paper, I cancelled my print and changed the printer, collected it and walked back in the room to see the mob I had called for to lynch the youtuber forming around the printer. I still had the printer queue open, 140/230mb, 11 items queued behind it. Well played, fresher, well played. You summed it up best when you asked "what have I done?". You done fucked up everything.

And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed impossible... 230mb .pdf file? They're made to save space - I have a 257kb .pdf file... and that's 60 pages. All I can guess is that every page contained a high res picture. Or every page was just a black page. Even if it is high def:
1. Why are you printing pictures?
2. Why are your pictures on a .pdf file?
3. Where the fuck did you find that .pdf file?
4. Why are you printing this? What course possibly needs you to print 18 pages of pictures? Oh wait, I can answer that one - sports.
5. Why, oh for the love of God why, would you bother to print them in black and white on standard printer paper on a laserjet if they're HD?
6. How did you get into university?
7. How have you lived so close to electrical appliances and not died yet?

And the reason I assumed she was a fresher was because if she made it into second year I weep for mankind.

On Writing

When I'm not trying to make a joke, when I'm trying to make a point or generally giving my opinion in blog posts, I sometimes feel like I'm wearing skintight clothes (yeah, enjoy that image). What I'm trying to say (whilst filling your head with the unholy image of manbreasts in a leotard) is that I'm self-conscious about my writing. Even now, I assume that somebody reading is thinking "well you should be self-conscious, you assuming, pretentious twat", which is fair enough. This is a blog, blogs are made of pretension and assumptions.

They're musings, from the mind, such as my current idea to make my own dishwasher using bleach, a laminated cardboard box and the shower head. This idea is flawless. Not only will there be food residue remaining, at some point I will imbibe a lethal level of bleach. Some would argue I should use more conventional dish-cleaning products, such as washing-up liquid. To those people I say this: Marie Curie was flossing with uranium and look how that turned out. I am destined to be a posthumous pioneer of the Homemade Ordinary Bleach Wash-a-matron (or HOBWAM), and they shall toast to my glory, as they raise bowls with bits of old meat and poisonous cleaning products still stuck to them.

Not sure how I got onto this really, it seems I was driving (metaphorically) and decided to (metaphorically) drive off a cliff. It's how the mind is. Without absolute stupidity the world would be a very boring place (and really, when you think about it, the HOBWAM could be a great way of instigating natural selection). Go team Darwin!

Who we are

For long periods of time (mostly on my walk to and from University) I ponder upon how we view each other. What is it in humanity that creates judgement from the smallest of characteristics?

If I meet somebody and tell them I play Star Trek online, they immediately have an impression of me in their head. If a month later they find out I participate in kickboxing, I become the geek who does a bit of training on the side. If, however, I lead with the kickboxing, and said about the shameful online gaming a month later, it's a completely different image. It's a more positive image - socially you're a few rungs further up the ladder despite doing the same thing.

For the record I don't play StarTrek online (though I hear it's fun) and technically I don't kickbox, but it was hypothetical. I do find it difficult to not judge people based on their activities, depending on the activities. Cosplay is one of those things. I don't have anything against it, I just find the motives behind dressing up as an anime character, pretending to be that character, slightly odd. It's probably very fun, I just can't help but judge people who professionally cosplay, or constantly cosplay, because to me it gives the message they're unhappy with their personalities and so must emulate the personality of their favourite anime character. Of course there will be people doing it for better reasons - vanity, carefree fun, but I always see the worst in it, as do most people, I assume.

But what is that? Why can't I just think "oh, that's nice, what else do you do?" What is it that attaches that stigma in the same way I consider people who don't use proper english to be of a lesser intelligence. It's pure elitism. Maybe it's ingrained in me, maybe I'm just a dick, it's irrelevant - I'm really trying to ignore the fact "u lyk 2 b on tym 4 skool", and sometimes it works. Other times I wonder if your dictionary was ran over by a Snowmobile and half of the vowels were obliterated. This is the weird thing though, I don't judge people based on sexuality, gender, race, height or weight, but if you can't spell, or you dress up as Yu-Gi-Oh on a regular basis, I can't help but harbour some prejudice, and I hate that I do so.

Politics and Perception

And with that ominously pretentious title a new blog post begins. Perception is everything. I often say that [abstract noun] is everything, and not to break rank, I'll continue with that. Continuity is everything.

I'm going to be very specific here, and talk about the police. People complain about the right wing media showing biased news, then proceed to treat the police as if they're all fascist robots, based on what they've seen of the police as shown by the media. It's a circle. I have a cousin in the police, and he certainly doesn't have a steel plate for a ribcage, he's a down to earth, reasonable guy. I'm not saying that police brutality doesn't exist - I've seen the police charging into stationary rioters in London, just that it's a minority, (or at least I percieve it to be a minority) and when people (yes, the police are people) all get tarred with the same brush, isn't that prejudice the exact same thing the police are accused of possessing? Yes they make mistakes, somebody shoots a black person on a subway, in the head, but is that one person representative of the whole country's law and order. Maybe I'm wrong here, maybe I'll change my mind when I experience it first hand, but from my perspective, in my comfy little bubble, there is no black and white.

Of course there's mostly black when you look at the government. David Cameron and his covenant are the real bad guys here. They're the bastards who are building a brick wall around the classes, those damn mobile class walls - let's change that, let's make sure the poor know their place. I even have a friend who advocates the tory party's budget cuts. He thinks it's the only way to climb out of the well of debt. He's probably right, but it's like saying the only way to solve overpopulation is to kill all the jews and blacks: it might solve overpopulation but that's one BNP manifesto Hitler signed and sealed himself. The greater good is rarely without evil.