Hazelnut's New Writeups

Super Injunction (idea)

2010-01-31T18:21:27Z

The British legal concept known as the super injunction is probably one of the biggest squelches of free speech since book burning and as such I am opposed to it incontrovertibly.

Building on the nation's status as a top destination for libel tourism, the super injunction is a relatively new judicial construct that goes above and beyond what an ordinary injunction would in the following ways:

First, there's the ordinarily injunctive part of it - a Court order, with penal notice ("If you breach the terms of this order you will be guilty of contempt of court and may be sent to prison"), forbidding someone from, or requiring them to, do certain things. This part of the injunction is only valid once it is served upon the person in question, like all other injunctions. Usually this will be forbidding the person (usually a media outlet) from publishing allegedly defamatory statements.
But next, there is also a provision which forbids e

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SimIsle (review)

2010-01-26T22:04:15Z

One of Maxis' "sim" series games from 1995, released for DOS and Windows 95, although their involvement was only as a publisher. The developers were a company called Intelligent Games and it was merely branded "sim" on publication.

It's also possibly one of the most morally dubious games I ever played . In it, you are the head of a subsidiary of a multinational corporation, named the Porpoise PanGlobal Corporation, and you are presented with a virgin, untouched tropical island somewhere in South East Asia (ecologically it is based on Malaya according to the manual), inhabited by grass-skirted natives who have contact with outsiders once in a century or something like that. You have a bank account, full of ECUs, or Ecological Currency Units, and a number of agents who have different skills like Construction, Exploration, Flora & Forestry, Industrial, Negotiation, Employment, and similar. You can either play with pre-set objectives, or just play free-form.

Are you seeing…

Cunt (review)

2010-01-07T22:01:10Z

Ah yes... Cunt, by Florian Himsl and Edmund McMillen, the shmup we all feared would exist one day. Either it's a puerile heap of borderline misogynistic pap, if you're a humourless killjoy prude, or, if you are, like me, a cunt, it's a work of brutal, depraved, demented, genius. Take your pick. I know which side of the fence I'd plump for (hint: the one that doesn't have frothers shouting "ban this sick filth" on it).

It works something like this - you control a floating disembodied penis that shoots bullets out its bell end and that is in orbit around a disembodied, planet-like anthropomorphic vagina. Your job is to shoot your bolts into the opening of same, which causes damage to it, and which, if you sling enough spooge up there, causes it to explode, which brings you to the next level. However, beware, for this is no querulous and quiescent quim, but a fierce fanny of forbidding fury which summons increasingly nasty…

Killing in the Name (review)

2009-12-30T10:39:55Z

1992 single by professional pseudo-revolutionaries Rage Against The Machine. Became Christmas Number One in Britain in 2009. Total heap of rancid, worm-infested shyte - and the Rancid, Worm-Infested Shyte Liberation Front have probably just put a price on my head for that grave insult to their cause as a result of this writeup.

There is nothing revolutionary or subversive about this song - or indeed about RATM - in any way whatsoever, unless you're a 15-year-old who can't be arsed to tidy your room, get to bed at a reasonable hour, or do your homework. Which, incidentally, is what that chorus line, "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" sounds like. The song is a ham-fisted attempt at sounding rebellious and socially aware - much like everything else by RATM, actually - with its generic railing against the government and identikit pretend socialism.

A delicious irony is that those who pushed the Facebook campaign to get RATM to number one to keep the X Factor off…

December 29, 2009 (log)

2009-12-29T20:05:19Z

Today something happened to me that I thought only happened in urban myths.

I was nonchalantly checking my inbox and I found I had a message from an old university friend from my first year. We'll call her Heidi because that's almost her name. Oh aye, I wonder what she's got to say. So I click it and I find myself confronted by a farrago of pictures of her in increasing states of undress.

Once I'd surreptitiously saved them to my hard disk for future reference, I read the body of the mail. Turns out that she wanted to send these to the boy friend and accidentally clicked "Send to All" and we all got an eyeful of her undercarriage.

Whoops.

I think I'd best be very careful when I go oot on the tap on New Year's Eve in case I pull and find myself minus a kidney.

Bastard!! (review)

2009-12-09T22:16:36Z

I will add a writeup about the animé.

First up, biases on the table - I'm not an animé fan. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Ditto manga. The closest I'll get to either are certain French bandes dessinées and ElfQuest (which has manga influences, esp, the stuff from the late 1980s, early 1990s), but that's about it. I think there's something about the fandom that puts me right off, yano, people dressing up in Japanese schoolgirl outfits when they're I. male, and II. at least thrice the age of a Japanese schoolgirl, that sort of thing. So it was with great caution that I scored myself the animé series Bastard!!.

I think I should also explain what got me into Bastard!! as well. Metal, that's what. The author of Bastard!!, one Kazushi Hagiwara, is quite the headbanger, and it shows. Many characters, spells, and places in Bastard!! are named after heavy metal bands, or Engrishified versions of same. For instance, the protagonist, Dark Schneider, isn't…