UKIP and the BNP

They claim they want to send people back for the sake of 'Keeping Britain British'. Have these people done any fooking research? The Scandinavian Vikings, the Italian Romans and the French Normans were all immigrants; they all 'came over here', 'took the jobs' and...oh yeah-murdered the previous occupants. And if you're classified by the Government as 'White British', guess what; there's about a 98 percent chance your family came from one of these. Why is it that it's ok to come over here and kill everyone, yet frowned upon to come over here and pay taxes like everyone else? I can tell you now, this recession we're in would be far worse without immigration, and even worse if we were under a right-wing government at the time when it hit hardest. So you see, immigration and diversity is the very essence of what Britain has stood for; of being 'British'- so how can UKIP and the BNP have the audacity to speak out against these things under the guise of patriotism and 'Keeping Britain British'? It's hypocrisy on a hilarious level, I tells ya.

Too much of a good thing...

(I've tried to substitute most of the technical phrases in this into easier-to-understand sentences, but it still may be unsuitable for those without knowledge of musical theory)

In popular music, it is a well known technique to move from the major chord of the key to the major chord of the harmonizing note, 2 tones up, generally then moving to the major chord one semitone up from that before returning to the key chord for the last bar or a dominant 7th. It is to be used sparingly though as it quickly loses effect after repetition, so a good usage would be replacing a standard relative minor progression with this on the second line of a verse. Unfortunately there are bands like Muse who just exploit this technique to the effect of it being regarded as 'cheap' by critics and musicians alike. They know no subtlety in this respect, with literally whole songs being comprised of this technique, banking on the fact the majority of listeners don't notice the blatant repetition.

In short, Muse are an insult to decent songwriters.

My gripe with those "You wouldn't steal a ...." adverts

(Don't get me wrong, I am opposed to theft)

They should pitch those anti-copyright theft adverts a little better; the stuff they portray is far too context-sensitive to be shown so ambiguously. An example- Yes, it is true that I would not go to a video store and steal a movie. However a far more accurate analogy depicting the realities of video piracy would instead be as the following: "Would you steal five pounds from James Cameron?", as in this scenario there are no local film shops at a loss, only a money-grabbing twat who could quite frankly do with an income deduction of way more than a fiver. Of course, they'll never air my version, because you'll end up with millions of people sitting down, seeing that advert and thinking "Yeah, actually".

Why I love Sony

(Bears most relevance to the 24th of April, but is sill an issue)

This is what I can deduce went on at Sony's latest executive meeting. "We have 2 consoles currently operating in the mainstream market, both of which have a lot of potential. Now I propose we use this money we've saved to acquire and fund some 3rd party companies to make some more decent exclusives for us as temporary lease contracts for single games can and probably will be bought out or obtained by Nintendo and/or Microsoft for free after the given period runs out, thus wasting our money." "We could...or we could just milk the success of the three good games we have by spending millions on prime-time TV commercials and banner ads." "Yeah sure, that does sound easier."

Oh, hey internets; I didn't see you there

So yeah, I gots me a blog. The reason being, Facebook annoys me. I like to rant, but the character limit (don't even get me started on twitter) forces me to write them in note format, which no-one even looks at. Thus, this should help me filter out my readership to those who truly enjoy my ramblings (Harry Martin). I'll also be transferring my previous Facebook articles of interest to here, for the sake of archiving. You can also expect to see links to my various forms of artwork as it's produced, as well as reviews for games, music and films.

-Laurie (who else would it be, dumbshit)