WillWybrow.com

I’ve been checking out some stand-up comedy DVDs recently to investigate whether any of the good and well-known comics of the day (including Mr. Carr, Mr. Gervais, Mr. Minchin, Mr. Bailey, Mr. Moran and a few others) hold views that are respectful or in any way sympathetic towards religious believers.

They’re not. Put plainly, if you believe in any non-trivial definition of god, you can’t laugh at jokes at the expense of the irrational, be they theists, psychics, “new age spiritualists,” etc., without incurring a hefty hypocrisy penalty and losing all credibility.

This tweet in reply to my glib observation of the above point suggests that my ability to laugh at humour that’s at the expense of “White [sic] people” is analogous to Christians’ ability to self-deprecate by enjoying comedy at their expense. No prizes for telling me why that doesn’t make any sense.

If you are religious, you are widely considered to be wrong. It takes some very shaky reasoning to justify even the most vague claims about a god without throwing questionably-sourced specifics in as well (read: Biblical claims). Any nonreligious person who is even vaguely aware of the damage that irrational faith, childhood indoctrination and religion as a force in its whole all cause to humans as individuals and humanity will look down on those who choose to accept religious beliefs. No matter how nice and tolerant they might seem to come across as, if nonreligious folk accept that religion is damaging then they must accept the religious are the root of the damage.

Stop laughing at our jokes belittling you. You don’t get to laugh, you are all too mired in your own self-sustaining incorrectness to laugh. God will smite you if you laugh.

Ewan McGregor stops the antimatter bomb, but turns out to be the bad guy all along.

This film doesn’t deserve its present IMDb rating of 7.1, since it was a bit of a shitpile. I haven’t read the book but if I had, I’d probably have thought even less of this film.

Go and see Star Trek instead of this. Angels and Demons was at least better than Wolverine, but not by very much. Hell, stay home rather than make the effort.

The new Star Trek movie was pretty enjoyable. Loads of explosions in space and aliens and rebelliousness — everything a healthy diet needs. But there weren’t very many people watching it.

There were two showings within a short time this evening: one at 5pm and one at 5:35pm. I was at the cinema for 5:15pm and barely saw anyone. A screenful of people could have already gone in. But if there were two showings so close to each other, one would expect it to be pretty teeming, right?

There were about fifteen people in our screen. A group of friends behind us and then three couples. Couples?! Is Star Trek a “couples” film? Keep in mind that the undoubtably terrible new Matthew McConaughey film “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” was on at the same time. Maybe that’s where all the people were except for those three couples? I don’t know. Star Trek just didn’t seem like the kind of film you’d go on a date to watch.

Anyway, yeah, it was a pretty good film. Go see it some time. I am going to watch the new Dan Brown adaptation about the Vatican’s fictional crackdown on 19th century geometrists later in the week, Angles and Demons. I’ll let you know how it is…

Hey, if anyone ever invites you to sit down and watch the film Wanted with them, RUN. Kick them in the groin and turn around and leave.

There are so many things wrong with this film that I hate the fact it made any money. Film makers should be honest with their film trailers and include relevant information (such as a warning branding the film as a load of bollocks) that informs potential viewers of what to expect.

Better start at the beginning, I suppose, with the film’s premise. A thousand years ago, a secret society of weavers was formed because they had magical powers to slow down time and kill people very easily. Stop reading for a moment and let that sink in. Weavers. People who make cloth out of threads. A thousand years ago, hardcore assassins would have been Medieval knights or something equally as cool, not cloth makers. I can’t think what kind of shit was thrown away as the writers decided that this was the best idea for a backstory that they could come up with.

The film got an 18 certificate. The thing is, it was narrated by the main character, who seems to take the approach of delivering motivational commentary in a style that might inspire 12-15 year-old males. Every time I listened to his voice, I was put in mind of some of the vocal work employed by Sega in some of their more recent Sonic the Hedgehog titles. Now, Sonic the Hedgehog is fifteen years old, and it’s not hard to imagine that he’d be portrayed as such by the actors voicing him. The only people who are going to look up to a fifteen year-old are kids around that age.

Next, the big hook of this film: bullet curving. You can’t curve a bullet. Game over, film idea is worthless.

The secret society of weavers recruit the hero guy to take down some rogue Jedi assassin who defected and killed the main hero’s father. But then we find out that the rogue assassin is the guy’s father and so the hero has to go back to kill the guys that recruited him in the first place. Well, that actually starts happening about 30 minutes in, after nearly a third of the film is spent explaining how bad the hero’s prior life is.

The society of weavers obey a giant magical loom that weaves binary code (UTF-8 maybe, the encoding was never satisfactorily explained) into a big cloth that spells out the name of the victims that the weavers have to kill.

A GIANT MAGICAL LOOM weaves the NAMES OF VICTIMS into a cloth. A magical fucking sentient (presumably) giant loom somehow decides people to kill (the weavers call it “fate”) and prints out the name, in binary, on a big sheet.

The weavers then (somehow) find the person (it is unexplained how they find them — Google, we must presume) and kill the person.

Also there is one Russian guy who ties bombs to rats, who tells the hero how to catch rats. Then rats are used when the hero blows up the weavers’ castle.

This film made no sense. The stuff that was feasible was either unnecessary to the plot or just stupid, and the stuff that was infeasible was just stupid. Please don’t watch this film, for your own good.

I was listening to the radio while I was in the kitchen getting some lunch. Matthew Bannister is sitting in for Jeremy Vine today, and I must say, apart from having a more boring voice, he and some woman he was talking to have just been bad-mouthing Saw the Ride, which I have been on, for all sorts of reasons, number one being that they are stuffy and boring and middle-aged and boring.

It’s a ride that I am liking more and more because of how much publicity there is over it. Saw is an incredibly well-performing franchise for all manner of reasons, and people who aren’t really into it dismiss it as unnecessary gore. I don’t mind that, these people are right; the gore is not necessary to watch, which is why Lionsgate executives aren’t dragging you from your homes and forcing you into the cinemas or DVD shops to pay money for their films. You don’t have to watch it if it isn’t your thing.

But people who are outspoken against it are outspoken for some rather invalid reasons. The point the woman on the radio made was that “people have become so desensitised” to on-screen violence.

Clearly she hasn’t given this very critical thought. So I offer you a chance to do it on her behalf. Tell me why becoming desensitised to violence is bad.

I don’t know if there are any good arguments for this. The only one I can think that people might use is a repackaging of “the media causes children to be violent” — an argument that hasn’t ever stood up to investigation (cf. every fucking complaint about the Grand Theft Auto series, ever).

Being desensitised to violence is probably a good thing. People are more rational when they don’t let their emotional reactions get in the way of thinking. Of course, if we’re witnessing a violent act in real life and we’re concerned for the safety of ourselves or those involved, we have a handy evolutionary asset called fear which gets us to run away from the danger. But obviously fake, on-screen gore isn’t something we really need to be ’sensitive’ to, is it?

What always bugged me, even when I was young, was when people comment on the unlikelihood of events happening in films. You know, when Jason Bourne makes an impossible jump, or John McClane runs through a storm of bullets without being hit.

Of course, saying “it’s just fiction, it doesn’t matter,” isn’t really a satisfying dismissal of those people. They nag and complain that the film is unrealistic and that makes it unenjoyable for them and unenjoyable for you.

But I had this idea when I was little that maybe all those unlikely things had to happen. That any story where they didn’t happen wouldn’t be very worth telling. There would somewhere be a version of the ‘Die Hard’ storyline where Alan Rickman kills Bruce Willis in the first ten minutes. But nobody wants to see a film like that. In a theoretical universe where every possible story is told, ones with hugely unlikely possibilities will eventually come into existence and they are the ones we read about in books and watch about in films.

Of course, these days I don’t care very much about all of that. Every now and then I’ll be aware that I’m watching something that others might be thinking is unrealistic. In which case I might wait until something relatively probable (but still a bit unlikely) happens and remark on how “this film is so unrealistic,” in a sort of terrible humour attempt.

But also nowadays, years from my initial feelings of ire at the bothersome critical appraisal of my immature peers, I realise that I’d basically applied the anthropic principle to storytelling. Woo! Young me was secretly clever!

…September 11th caused the popularity of blogging…

…then you might just be a douchebag.

My twin brother turned me on to blogging in 2001. At that time, not too many people were actively blogging. That soon changed after 9/11. Blogs boomed in popularity and On the Fritz was one of them.

Halfway down his “About” page on his website.

This guy also thinks that Rick Rolling started in 2007 with an episode of Family Guy, and that it’s intrinsically homophobic.

Do this guy a favour and drop him a line at fritz@fritzliess.com to let him know how much of an incompetent fool he really is.

It helps if you look at the five-long series of films as not a series of films, but more like a TV serial. In each one, we’re introduced to new people and we learn more about the old ones. Saw could have worked if it were a horror-plot-twisting weekly thing to tell the same story. Sort of a Dexter-Lost hybrid.

The problem is, people don’t look at it that way. They expect each installment to have its own riveting plot and have a beginning and a proper conclusion. Well, it totally doesn’t work that way. One has to look at the story as a whole.

And obviously the people who say “OH LOL SAW IS JUST AN EXCUES 4 LOTS OV BLUD AND VIALENCE ITS NOT VERY GUD LOL” are really closeminded. Maybe I should get some DVD rips and edit it together as a kind of Saw TV show. As long as I don’t tell Lionsgate about it, I should be fine, right?

I, uh, watched this mad film just now, “Cashback.” And it’s mad. Like, really mad.

It’s about a few things really. Some prevalent themes are: artistic oggling; female nudity (and one could argue that this and the previous item are basically the same, but they aren’t); and Sainsbury’s. Aside from these, there’s a peppering of love, insomnia and then there’s a plot built on that. Apparently, not sleeping gives people the power to magically stop time.

This was such a fucking stupid film. Nothing actually happens in it at all. Some guy with a really decent life breaks up with his girlfriend and suddenly stops sleeping. It’s about the fragility of the human emotional state, but it’s horseshit. These days, everyone (especially those of the male persuasion) is really desensitised to emotion. Everything rolls off people today, and nobody gives a shit. Oh no, you broke up with your girlfriend. Big whoop, far worse stuff happens to people all the time and who cares? Nobody. But for some reason, this really talented guy with a decent life gets granted magical powers to freeze time. It’s a big whole part of the film. At first I thought it was just a metaphor or visualisation of his daydreaming, but then he starts doing stuff in his frozen moments. And he cracks his fingers to unfreeze time. What the fuck? If there ever were a “Bernard’s Watch: the Movie,” where Bernard grows into a closet homosexual starving artist trying to make it in art school, this film is it. And he works at Sainsbury’s (which is portrayed completely unrealistically). Arrgh, the stupidity of this film is elevating my blood pressure a ton.

I think it’s safe to say that I didn’t “get” the point of this film. Obviously. Why does he have magical powers? Why, with these magical powers, does he not just take stuff from the tills at his work? Fucking hell, I always wished I could freeze time and dip my fingers into the cash drawers at work. No, all he does is strip women and draw fucking pictures of them. Yeah, all well and good if you can draw, but why not take a bunch of cash as well? Jesus, it’s not more morally reprehensible to nick a few hundreds of pounds from a multi-million pound corporation than it is to undress women without their permission and draw pictures of them. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS FILM TRYING TO SAY?!

I need something to reduce my blood pressure, quick…

Oh yeah, that’s right, my superfast fibre optic internet connection. I watched Iron Man today for the first time in reasonable quality since the cinema. That’s not to say I didn’t try; the telesync (should this be capitalised?) version was awful and the VHS screener was slightly better. It was amazing, but Downey Jr. looks different every time I watch the film. Good actor, though.

So, I am pushing for financial contributions to create a really sexy Linux-based server for the house. It would store the house’s shareworthy files to save four things: 1) personal space on hard drives; 2) the need to download things more than once (which would piss our ISP off, I’m sure, all the unnecessary bandwidth); 3) the transfer of files to and from PCs (requiring everyone’s computer to be on and someone there to grant access) and 4) the insecurity of personal shares on computers.

I want to write a bittorrent program that lets users submit torrent requests and it handles them automatically and fairly (queuing users according to past use, for example). But I won’t do it without a server, so in order to encourage me to program and develop my skills, any personal donations of computer equipment (quad core processors, SATA hard drives etc.) or hard cash would be appreciated incredibly.

But without a server, we’ll probably end up with a shitty network hard drive.

Some professions just look like a really good time to me. They don’t necessarily have to be the most prestigious or well-paying jobs, nor do they have to last forever. But these are a few things I would love to at least try, and why.

Train Driver

This one might sound weird, but I love travelling on the train. Not only would I have the perks of being the one who announces stuff on the train, but I’d get the added bonuses of: free (or discounted) rail travel so I could go all over the country; a really good working knowledge of rail lines, so I can seem really useful when people are casually wondering about train times and distances and prices all around the country; and, if I’m feeling vindictive, the chance to utterly nuke people who haven’t got the right tickets, like I saw one woman doing once. I don’t remember her name, but she looked like my old Biology teacher who loved nuking kids who didn’t do their homework, to the fullest extent she could, so I will call her Zoe. I’ve been on two of her trains (I remember what she looks like), and on one of them, there was this Chinese guy in my coach who had bought a ticket using a Railcard discount, but only had some vague paperwork in place of an actual Railcard; it might have been the application form, but he was really far away. Anyway, the outcome of it was that he was absolutely buggered, and had to pay over £40 to get the proper ticket. Boom!

Astronaut

I never really “had” this when I was a child. That is, I never really wanted to go into space like it is stereotypical of children to want to do. But recently, the idea has been appealing to me more and more. It’s ever since I started obtaining all the Futurama episodes and wrote that Biomars article. So I am a late bloomer, maybe they all are? Space is getting more attractive these days. Maybe it’s subconsciously metaphorical for escaping?

Film Editor

All that slicing and splicing of film into itself… it’s only going to get more digital in the future, and digital is what I do best. Imagine how good the computers are that those guys have… With all that raw digital footage in really high definition, they must be some machines. That would make me happy on a day-to-day basis. Also, I’d get to see films in the making.

I love films. I would love to be involved in the filmmaking process. I think it might be a bit farfetched to set my eyes on the director’s chair. I have the visions for films sometimes, but I’m not sure they’d be sustainable enough to make me a good director, who has to manage the whole feel of the film, made up of all the bits, throughout the filming. But if you shoot it, I can put it together, I guarantee it.

Plus, holy fuck, I bet these guys get to hang around on set on all the best films. They get to see all the bits that might not make it in and get to see bits of movie before everyone else does. And I’d bet they get invited to the premieres. With all the stars. And when you go and see the film at the cinema with your mates, you can look at it and think, “yeah, I put that together.”

These are some of my thoughts for stuff I would like to do one day. It’s a nice and varied list. In an ideal world, I’d get to do all of them at some point. That would be great!