Friday, Rebecca Black and the Internet

Happy Nailed to Wood Day readers! I hope we all went out today and played a small part in the death of somebody's deity. So yes it's Easter Friday over here in Australia and I thought it presented a golden opportunity to talk about Rebecca Black, her song "Friday" and why the internet is balls. I guess this post could've easily been done on any Friday but fuck it, if the whole "dying for our sins" story isn't going to even bother making any sense at all then I don't see why I can't make a teensy weensy stretch every now and then.

So anyway as I'm sure all you computer savvy types are aware Rebecca Black is some underage American girl who managed to do the impossible and record a song that has more dislikes on Youtube than Justin Bieber. For anyone who isn't familiar with the song here's the link. Now you have no excuses.

Now because my family are an ironic bunch we actually have a Friday morning ritual where we gather 'round a computer and share the awful hilarity that is this song. Now that is not to say we actually like this song. We just find it hilariously bad. But there's also something sweet and endearing about it's complete lack of quality and inspiration. I actually think Rebecca Black is a bit adorable in a completely non-creepy kind of way. The way she sings her garbage song with a big smile on her face and sways around enthusiastically without even a hint of exploiting her womanly wares is so endearing. Rebecca Black looks like she's purely in it for the fun, fun, fun, fun; which is actually refreshing in todays cynical, marketing fueled, bleak existence we find ourselves in.

But the internet can be a harsh place. On the internet every single person is on a soapbox and decided to projectile vomit instead of giving a speech. The annonymitty the internet allows us has also allowed for the growth of giant, errect dicks on everyones heads. Everyone developes a sort of twisted messiah complex, which I guess makes this post relevant to Easter after all. I mention this because Rebecca Black, who is 14 or some shit, is getting absolutely flamed by every man and his dog and some of it gets quite nasty. In an interview a reporter tactlessly asks Rebecca "have any of these comments made you cry?" Rebecca attempted to brush the question aside but luckily the reporter was there to remind her of some of the worst ones she's read. "I hope you develope and eating disorder and become attractive" the trashy journo quotes. Rebecca chokes up slightly but manages to brave through it all with more than just a hint of that youthful enthusiasm seen in her video. Rebecca even made a rather humorous video that claimed various bullshit metaphores and subtexts were present in the song, making it much deeper than most people were aware. And that's why I like her I guess. She was way too young to be exposing her crappy pop song to the festering swamps of the internet but at least she is able to shrug it off and have a laugh about it.

So I guess my point here is this. Don't be such a fucking awful jerk. I know it's the internet and you like to shock people with your references to Hitler and suicide. There's a thousand differences between being clever or cynical and just being a plain old cunt. I realise I'm literally powerless to stop such behaviour but I tell you what. If I have at least one crazed fan out there who hospitalizes someone who actually wished death or rape on Rebecca Black then my blog will have been worth it.

The Homework Project

I literally haven't got a clue how many people actually read this blog of mine but for those of you who do so regularly I have an exciting opportunity for you. I have decided to start up a new element to my blog. It's called "I.P ate My Homework" and basically I want my readers to submit to me their homework and I will do my best to do it in a humorous way. This won't, I repeat won't, be a serious attempt and is not intended for you to submit to your teacher. It's just a fun little mockery of how shit the education system is. My only rule is that it not be homework of a higher education level than high school, so no Topology assignments please. You may also feel free to set challenging parameters of your own in place. For example you might ask me that as a part of the essay I must include this topless picture of your mum as an additional text. I honestly don't know how this will play out but I thought it might be a neat little experiment and if it takes off I might attempt to make it a regular thing.

Nintendo 3DS (plus some first impressions of games)

So the Nintendo 3DS has launched in Australia and I have been one of the people lucky enough to have played one. That's not to say I actually own one. But my brother got one launch day and I've done my fair share of dicking around with it. And dicking around is something the 3DS caters for quite nicely, with a whole bunch of pre-installed software that are actually quite reminiscent of the kind of things that Apple bundle with their Macbooks. There's some light-hearted sound sampling and photo taking apps as well as an actually quite fun game, the name of which currently eludes me, in which you can take photo's of people and turn them into enemies you can shoot. It's actually kind of fun and clevey in that it utilizes the camera's in the gameplay and manages to recreate your friends as 3D disembodied heads. Mind you it looks kinda crappy when the heads rip holes in the "real world" revealing void of some sorts. I'm sure it'd be impossible to explain what I mean to anyone who hadn't actually played this game so you'll just have to trust me, it looks like a messy arse.

Speaking of messy I've found it pretty hard to find a nice flat surface in my room to play the Augmented Reality games due to my desk being littered with uni work and miscellaneous crap. But I guess I can't really blame Nintendo for that. What I can blame them for is the tutorial, which failed attrociously to explain if and how I'm supposed to use the other character cards for the AR games. I probably need to explain this. You see the 3DS comes with a small collection of cards (like trading cards) with the idea that you can use the AR software and the 3DS camera to inject 3D models into your room or wherever you happen to have set down the card. It actually works really well and manages to quite convincingly manipulate the top of my desk. However the tutorial was pretty skimpy with letting me know what the other cards did. There's one with Link, one with Mario, one with Kirby, etc. and the game sort of hints that they can be used so that you can take photos that look like Link is running around your kitchen or Samus is pole dancing in the palm of your hand but I can't for the life of me figure it out based on the tutorial alone. I suppose I could read the instruction manual but quite frankly I haven't had to read one of those for a game in well over a decade and I don't much feel like breaking that streak just so I can take pictures of Kirby picking lint out of my bellybutton.

So anyway, on to the games. The real games. The ones that you have to buy separate and are designed to have lasting appeal. And after seeing the current launch titles available for the 3DS you could be forgiven for thinking there really aren't any real games at all. There are several renditions of Nintendogs, which only differ significantly from their DS predecessors in that they now have cats too. Mostly it's a bunch of stuff I don't give a crap about. My brother got two games for 3DS; Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition and the even more absurdly titled Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars 3D. Shadow Wars 3D actually reminded me a lot of the Advance Wars game in that it's a sort of turn based RTS mixed genre  type thing and I actually saw quite a lot of potential in there from the opening mission I played. SSF IV 3D was also pretty cool and featured some interesting new fighting angles to take advantage of the whole 3D thing and some neat touch screen stuff that will help balance out the slightly fiddley controls. The story for SSF IV 3D is fairly typical of the series. There's some very evil organisation that wants to do something evil to the world but nobody quite knows what and they figure the best way to achieve this evil goal is to hold a fighting tournament. I know not a single sane person on the planet plays Street Fighter games for their gripping narrative but I don't really understand why there needs to be such a complex shambles of a story just to set up a series of situations in which people bitch slap each other for 2 minutes or so.

In closing I see a lot of potential in the 3DS and I'd say that the console is largely selling off of that. The 3D effect works extremely well and, as Nintendo seemed quite keen to bang on about, you don't need to wear any glasses for it. There are quite a number of interesting games for the 3DS on the horizon, although I can't for the life of me figure out why they haven't got at least one of them ready for launch? I also find it amusing that so many of the titles of the games announced for the 3DS have the word 3D in them. It's kind of like we've come full circle from over a decade ago when people would put the word 3D in the title because it had a 3D model in it or because you could rotate your character 360 degrees. I mean that infamous SNES game Noah's Ark 3D was boasting 3D in it's title and that game looks like a garbage pancake. It makes me feel kind of old as I scoff at the absurdity of it all. But when The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D finally comes out my snorts of smug superiority will no doubt be silenced somewhat as I suck Nintendo's dick.