The Playstation Generation

A couple of weeks ago my Facebook page was defaced with a youtube video of the new Ghost Recon game's portrayal of American troops fighting a war in Peshawar, naturally I put on both beard and my shalwar kamis in a frenzy and made the decision to go outside and burn a few star spangled banners in a show of sporting appreciation. Okay so none of that really happened, but I was offended and for once I found myself siding (at least on the surface) with the resentful bearded fascists whom I needless to say tend to distance myself from. The youtube video itself became a troll fest with the "modern camp" versus the "barbaric anti-western camp".


One side seemed profoundly pleased that their city had been given the publicity it so clearly deserved in a game that people will play across the world, the other saw it as politically incorrect. I am not going to try to reconcile the two I'm merely going to tell you why the cool modern crowd is extremely disillusioned.


1) Peshawar has seen enough violence, the last thing anyone wants is for American troops to be fighting a war there, it is unlikely you will be able to empathize with me on this point unless you've actually lived through the worst period in the city's history. Taking the strained nature of Pak-US relations into account it is completely inappropriate for people to rejoice about a Peshawar being portrayed in such a light.


2) The Playstation Generation lacks remorse, when sent to war people who have grown up playing virtual representations of war see each kill as just another point in a deathmatch. Whether you choose to admit it or not children will grow up playing this game, one day they will join the army and they will be more than ready to invade Peshawar. To those of you who think this is conjecture. I'm sure you're all familiar with the famous collateral murder video (go watch it).


Yes it's JUST A GAME but games are political, the enemy is always dehumanized  and I don't appreciate the opinions of people who are so desperate to appear modern and liberated that they start celebrating when they see something that should upset them. On a side note the game is a clear gears of war clone they've even copied the needlessly disorienting crotch zooming camera when you move from cover to cover.

Os justi meditabitur sapientiam, et lingua ejus loquetur judicium.

So piracy is stealing right? Wrong! It's just another piece of Orwellian doublespeak that you've been brainwashed *ahem* I mean socialized into accepting. This isn't to say that I want to bitch-slap every poor soul who happens to read this with a painfully stiff hardback edition of the communist manifesto, I simply don't have the energy but what I will say is that the words Read in the name of your Lord who created you contain an implicit obligation not to read Twilight.

Say you go out and buy a loaf of bread (yes you're a boring hypothetical person and you often decide to buy things that reflect your own lack of character) you pay for it because at any given moment there are a limited number of loaves out there, in paying for your loaf you deprive a bunch of other hypothetical bread enthusiasts of their prize. You walk out of the store with your head held high because YOU alone are entitled to this loaf; you can now go home butter it, have sex with it, or put it in some sort of pretentious display cabinet. In any case the bread is no more, it is either in your stomach, censored, or covered in the fungus of your own bourgeois bread enthusiast tendencies. Wonderful!

Here's where things get complicated, the thing with data is, in all honesty it's made of zeros and ones, the mp3 you're listening to, the movie you're watching, this godforsaken blog they're all just zeros and ones. The thing with zeros and ones that makes them a bit different to bread is that they can be replicated infinitely at no cost whatsoever. You can refresh this page a million times and other people will still be able to see it, you can download as many mp3s as you want (they won't run out). So what we have in essence is an infinite supply in our world of limited loaves of bread and resource wars we have something that can be spread over the internet ( mankind's collective consciousness) for free! The net is truly vast and infinite.

"Hang on a second!"

Says the record company boss, "You've been paying me (way too much) to produce physical media for decades now, just because I'm as obsolete as the clichés I sell you doesn't mean I'm not going to lobby for intellectual property laws that create ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY".

But you're not going to be satisfied by such inane banter NO! You're going to leave your loaves of bread behind and call for pirates to be stopped because you care for artists and inventors those wonderful people who have over the years created things that have made your sad life easier. Except true art isn't something that people create for remuneration, the reason we get the same banal bullshit over and over, the reason Justin Bieber was born is because mainstream "art" is simply a cash grab. Companies know what people want or what they've been conditioned to want, and that's exactly what they give them. 

The internet is opening avenues for people to self publish and self produce and while a small subculture of online pirates can be tolerated anybody who dares shift the balance between creative individuals and their all encompassing production companies must be stopped. That's right they must be eliminated at all costs! Even if it means cooperating with governments all over the world to arrest some yacht owning dot com fraud in New Zealand. This is what happened to the fat bloke who owned Megaupload. 

Becoming a Cyborg in Peshawar

                                            "Listen to my story.....this may be our last chance".

The problem with making entries so infrequently is that one often finds it difficult to recall events that took place right at start of where one's account is supposed to begin. Not that I have the memory of a goldfish, I can remember the important bits and pieces quite clearly, I can watch them over and over again in my minds eye, unfortunately my mind's eye'suffers from nostalgic myopia and can quite frankly be a real dick sometimes. 

We catch up with our hero as he's making his way back home, heading to Peshawar over Christmas break, in the highest of spirits. He dresses for the occasion, combs his beard, wears a leather jacket and looks in the mirror like a narcissist for half an hour. "What fun it is knowing you're going to spend the next month having your every whim catered to" he muses as he steps into Heathrow airport glowing like the smug bastard he is, staring at all the forlorn expressions he passes, soaking in all that lovely schadenfreude. 

On the plane he sits next to a failed lawyer turned accountant, and a medical rep he's in such a merry mood that he spends the whole flight talking to this medical rep about life till the plane lands, at this point our hero emerges waits for his luggage, smoking in front of Benazir Bhutto airport's no smoking sign, borrowing a lighter from one of the security staff "home at last". His mother is here to pick him up, what a sight she is for sore eyes, he goes with her to his grandparents' house in Islamabad, his grandmother remarks on how handsome he looks (our hero takes this as a quite a compliment as she is the biggest nitpicker on the planet appearance wise). 

Off to Peshawar the city where (as our hero will soon discover), traffic jams no longer exist, dentists are all closet-sadists and your next door neighbours are squatting on part of your lawn. At this point our hero who happens to be narrating this story tires of referring to himself in the third person. 

Fast forward x8 - met the family, went to a few dinners, met the new puppies (who are to be given away as soon as my mother is done enjoying the cutest stage of their lives, which surprisingly enough doesn't seem to have happened yet), went on a number of father-son walks, lounged about eating parhatas in the morning, you know the drill.

Just when I thought things couldn't get any better I fell ill, I spent a 5 days in bed, but who am I kidding in Peshawar even being ill is fun! Because when you get better and actually start meeting people again, the people who you told you couldn't meet earlier because you were sick run into you by coincidence (when you're out with other people) and accuse you implicitly of lying "alaka te bemar na we?". 

Traffic jams no longer exist in Peshawar because there's some sort of repair work being done on the ring road meaning every blasted car in the city is now on the main road. This essentially means that the traffic moves at 2 cm per second 24/7 which in turn means that there isn't an instant when the main road is not jam packed, hence if "traffic jam" is a relative term referring to abnormal vehicular congestion it no longer applies to the state of affairs in Peshawar. As somebody who suffers from extreme road rage I found this difficult to cope with, I usually drive around with this song playing in my head http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n2LMZEtA_s ahhh I need to buy an old sprinter some day (I like old things, they're made to a better standard than things today. I'd rather turn one of those obsolete spinny circular phone dials than fiddle with my mobile's gimmicky touch screen...why did I buy this phone again? Because I'm a self loathing socialist-consumerist prick that's why). 

At this point I realized I had loads of work to do, 1 research essay (practically a dissertation) 1 normal essay, and a mock trial to prepare for, it was like being hit on the head with a hammer, I knew deep down that my holidays were over and I would spent the next 2.5 weeks working like a slave to the legal system that I aspire to be part of some day. The next few days were spent with selective amnesia, Nope I had nothing to worry about, I sat there playing Gears of War 3 with my brother (a shitty game mind you) watched tv, went out some more etc etc.

During my last 2 weeks I forced myself into being a nocturnal in an attempt to actually get some work done, this worked, when I wasn't wasting time on youtube, I also conveniently ignored my Junior Counsel who was raging at me on Facebook for not keeping her informed about the progress of our case...hello WE HAVE NO CASE BIYATCH!  DAMN IT I HAVE ESSAYS TO FINISH FIRST GRRRR is what I wanted to say but couldn't. Oh speaking of the case, which is going to be in front of 3 high court judges 1 week from now, I had a suit tailor made for the occasion *strikes a pose* this is going to be my first ever trial in front of a real judges and I'm understandably nervous.  http://objection.mrdictionary.net/go.php?n=5495424

Instead of unwinding I wound myself up, there were lots of people I wanted to meet whom I didn't have time to hang out with, I have done my best to pacify them with an apologetic facebook status. I had a root canal 48 hours before my flight back to England, this needless to say hurt like hell (never had one before) I thought most of the rumours about pain were exaggerations by people who just hated dentists. Unfortunately I was wrong and I realised this while the nerves inside my tooth were mercilessly being scraped out with a bottlebrush, the guy kept on asking if I felt any pain. Silly me I assumed anybody who heard noises like this  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7ftpF10U1M  would notice that their patient was undergoing sufficient trauma, alas the scraping continued.

My parents dropped me at the airport, I left them behind swerving my luggage trolley through the crowd in a metaphoric display of independence, I'll miss them as usual, I'll miss everyone but now isn't the time for homesickness, I just got back after all.

Here I am back, back in England, in my room feeling sorry for myself, finishing off one of my essays, eating microwavable rubbish with my head at a 90 degree angle chewing only on 1 side.  Now the reason this  may be our last chance is that if I get pissed off enough I may just stop writing in this blog altogether, this may be the last post you ever read, I was never very faithful to any of my diaries as a child, they usually became doodling books after 2 entries. Bonus points for anybody who recognises where the quote at the beginning came from! Ah yes and because the place where the nerves in my tooth should be is now filled with synthetic material I am for all intents and purposes a cyborg, I don't know why I came to this conclusion but musing over it is how I kept myself busy on the flight back. In flight entertainment you ask? My seat's console was out of order, This is PIA you should be happy I'm alive.

I swore the first post on this blog wouldn't be a bloody recollection of events..

But..Fate is in the habit of conspiring against me. Here I am, alone in my hotel room, in Scotland of all places. I haven't been here since I was a toddler fighting with my cousin over whose action figures were more powerful, I will admit it is a very hazy memory indeed but I'm sure it took place in Edinburgh, we put coins into one of those machines that give you bouncy balls and other cheap Chinese artifacts. I had a miniature set of bowling pins while he had a whistle, I was quite jealous of the whistle but I managed to convince him my bowling pins were better as there were more of them. Unfortunately none of these things actually relate to the city of Edinburgh itself but at that age who really gave a shit about the rustic buildings that I am now so taken by, I swear getting out of the train station was like emerging into the middle ages (and having my name changed to Altair), I automatically and most probably rightly assumed that this was the result of Hitler not having bombed Scotland to kingdom come, this point of view was affirmed by my taxi driver who in response to my amazement declared with a grin on his face "Adoulf Hitlerr liked us Scots it is an insulting thought at first but the results speak for themselves".

Right so I'm in my hotel room, well more like a fancy B&B but the owners are wonderful, the rooms are spotless and most importantly the breakfasts are hearty who could ask for anything more? I've been making do on toast and pot noodles as travelling up to Edinburgh is by itself not an expense I was expecting to cover, there's something satisfying about spreading sandwich spread on toast alone in a hotel room, it's like you're a hunter gatherer, the alpha male returning to his roots walking all the way to the Asian corner shop in the rain, procuring a bag of nourishment, being taken aback by the Scottish 10 pound note he receives as change, wondering if he has been given what essentially looks like monopoly money, that's right the alpha male knows always to suspect his own kind. 

The Chronology of this post fails, but as I was coming here on the train I was in the quiet coach surrounded by quiet old people, I usually like my peace and quiet but I wanted them to speak, I've been having these surreal dreams lately full of strange little people who can read minds and sword fights with the Queen, but yes I wished they would strike up a conversation, if not with me, with themselves at least! 

Today was the day though eh! The day I gave the JLPT N4 exam, it was both easier and more difficult than I expected I won't bore you with the details but it went pretty well, I met somebody else who had come up all the way from England because the centre in London was full, this has had an amazing effect on me, suddenly I wasn't the only dickhead who had bothered coming this far North to give an exam in a language written using squiggles that make your head spin instead of our wonderful phonetic alphabet, I think he felt the same way to be honest. 

Speaking of surreal dreams I have to prepare a presentation for my Surrealism seminar tomorrow on some sort of silly film by Bunuel, note I did not take this module by choice I am actually a law student with french as a second major, and this years cultural french module is - tada - Surrealism, at this rate I should go there with a blank power-point and give them a taste of what they all love so much, stand there pointing at a blank screen, opening my mouth but making no sound! They can write an essay on it afterwards detailing how they were so absorbed by the depth of my subconscious it made them all piss on themselves to increase their appeal to the opposite sex, like the bull I was watching on bbc4 while eating dinner last night, he pissed on himself to augment his sexuality and ended up attracting a sizable harem (at which point I spat my food out), if only it were that easy.

I just had a hot shower, a really really hot shower to somehow get me in the mindset I need to be in, in order to get myself through this movie that I know will make no sense whatsoever. It's 2:31 am at least I can look forward to another one of those hearty breakfasts before I embark on the 6hr train journey home, well I say home but I don't actually mean home I mean my home away from home! All is not lost for in 10 days time yes that's right - en dix jours je parte en vacances, chez moi!  Thank you Christ for duping the world into thinking you were born on the 25th of December. 

Well that was cathartic, and incredibly lame at the same time..this first post doesn't bode well at all for this blog, I sense a shitty future awaits, one that will in no way live up to the art of Yoshitaka Amano that adorns this blog.