Daily Horoscope?

Greetings friends, as a large number of you seem very eager to update me daily on the vague, generalised stabs in the dark that are your horoscopes, despite the fact I am not a libra or cancer or whatever it is you are and are super EXTRA not interested, even if I was a crazy nutjob who believed anything the voodoo lady told me, I have decided that instead of pointing out all the flaws of astrology and then maybe pointing out how stupid you are for a) believing in it and then possibly b) for continuing to support the lunatics and scam artists that perpetuate the nonsense, I will instead cash in on the whole thing and write your daily horoscopes for you. My horoscopes are more awesome than all the other horoscopes and if you disagree with that then you are entitled to your own opinion (and that opinion is wrong.) Here is your horoscope for today, let me know how accurate I am: "If things aren't looking up there is a probability that they are instead looking down (sources: Science). Taking this knowledge into consideration you should probably not attempt to stare at a wall and hold your breath for two hours straight as this might result in death, although probably not so maybe do try it after all and if you die then we can chalk that up to survival of the smartest. A financial investment opportunity will come your way when you briefly consider buying all the coffees from a starbucks and selling them from out the back of a van at double price, however this idea will fall through when you realise that nobody can afford to take out a mortgage just to buy coffee in this current economic climate. There is a high probability that if you make yourself a sandwich you will also eat it, except where you don't or where you are making a sandwich for another person. Your lucky colour has sadly been deleted." Thanks for your time. If you feel that this time was wasted you can consider it time that you owed me for all the time I had to spend setting your horoscope messages to ignore. Don't forget to check back tomorrow for your daily horoscope, if you do forget you will probably be hit by a car and you will die knowing that you weren't forewarned of it happening (except that I just told you so ignore that.)

James Cameron: Pioneering shiny things.

Note: The following paragraph is italicised. This is to denote that it is a letter within a letter. I'm sure the majority of you understand this, I wouldn't ever assume otherwise, however this piece of writing is directed towards those of the world who actually enjoyed James Cameron's Avatar and I feel that I am going to have to explain absolutely everything in the clearest possible terms in order to get my message across.

P.S Patronising means to talk down to someone.

Dear James Cameron,


I find myself at a loss. Am I the only person in the world who didn't like Avatar? I appreciate that you probably couldn't care less either way, after all through the wash of critical praise you may only need to stop getting your dick sucked to re-inflate your head or burn money to keep yourself warm. I guess I've got to congratulate you on that one. You masturbated some gimmicky shiny things across cinema screens and the world lapped it up.

I'll come clean immediately. I watch a lot of shit films. I watch a lot of shit films because I watch a lot of films and in order to feel like the films I watch have any amount of worth, I need to also watch the shit films to help set baselines for what is good and what is bad. Also sometimes films that you think are going to be bad actually turn out to be awesome.

I'm mentioning this because never before in the history of ever, has a film made me so angry that I have wanted to walk out, demand my money back, demand my time back and then suckerpunch the teeth out of the ticket booth attendants head when he tells me that isn't actually possible to do. (In reality I think this anger would probably have been expressed in the more moderate way of taking off my dumb 3D glasses and hurling them at the screen. Take that James Cameron you bastard.)

'Where's the justification for this!?' I might hear you cry if you enjoyed Avatar, but I won't because I generally try to phase out the sound of other people talking. If you didn't enjoy Avatar by the way stop reading this rant and go and do something a little more interesting like, I don't know, maybe get a life.

Now under the assumption that anybody who has agreed with me so far has stopped reading and that anybody who disagrees with me probably lacks the ability to read I will continue raving uncompromisingly anyway.

"I basically sat down and put everything in this that I ever wanted to see in a movie – and that’s why it’s such a grab-bag of visual concepts."

 This is James Cameron himself speaking on Avatar. I've taken the liberty of translating this from Douchebag back into English.

"I basically stole a load of ideas from other mediums and glued them together with air regardless of whether it made contextual sense or not. That's why it's such a shit-bag of weak concepts."

I don't know what a "grab-bag" is though, so I kind of improvised that bit.

“It came from all the science-fiction books I read when I was a kid and it just gestated over time.”

Another unedited quote where Cameron basically reinforces his previous statement.

“We’re telling the story of what happens when a technologically superior culture comes into a place with a technologically inferior indigenous culture and there are resources there that they want,”

If you haven't seen Avatar yet (don't) then you won't be aware that this is Cameron talking about the basic plot of the movie. Maybe the more astute reader might be able to draw some kind of relation to real world political events. In any other film this would be called a "subtext" but not in Avatar. That paragraph above is about as deep as it gets, and just in case we were too stupid to understand it, Cameron spends three entire hours driving the same nail home over and over again. Before the first hour is through you will quite probably be so annoyed by the incessant preaching that you too might throw your dumb 3D glasses at the screen.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad for Cameron to patronise his own audience with this bland attempt at a storyline (after all they enjoyed it so far) if it wasn't a carbon copy of another shit film that not only came twenty years beforehand, but also managed to still, somehow, be better than Avatar.

What am I talking about? Okay let's take a look at a brief plot synopsis for the film "Dances with Wolves" from IMDB.

"Having been sent to a remote outpost in the wilderness of the Dakota territory during the American Civil War, Lieutenant John Dunbar encounters, and is eventually accepted into, the local Sioux tribe. He is known as "Dances with Wolves" to them and as time passes he becomes enamoured by the beautiful "Stands With a Fist". Not soon after, the frontier becomes the frontier no more, and as the army advances on the plains, John must make a decision that will not only affect him, but also the lives of the natives he now calls his people."

Okay you got that? Now let's compare it to the plot synopsis for James Cameron's avatar.

 "Having been sent to a remote outpost on the planet Pandora, ex-marine Jake Sully encounters, and is eventually accepted into, the local Na'avi tribe. As time passes he becomes enamoured by the beautiful Neytiri, a Na'avi princess. Not soon after, in search of resources, the army advances on the home of the Na'avi and Jake must make a decision that will not only affect him, but also the lives of the natives he now calls his people."

If you didn't catch that, the brief of it is that a military guy winds up being accepted into this tribe, falls in love with one of them and then decides that he doesn't want to fight for the US anymore and will instead lead this tribe in a battle to fight back against the invading Americans. I've already forgotten which film I was describing... Did I say Dances with Wolves or was this Avatar? Who can tell anymore!

After leaving us with a plagiarised storyline, Avatar finishes it up nicely with poor character development that allows the relationship between the main character and the Na'avi princess to develop over the course of a montage. If you thought the storyline and character development in Avatar was "good" then you should be banned from watching films because you are funding this mindless shit and you're ruining it for the rest of us.

At least we have those "groundbreaking" special effects to look forward to. The ones that James Cameron didn't shut up about for years on end. Let's take a look at those shall we?


This is a mixture of motion capture technology and CGI. "Groundbreaking" as Cameron would call it, or it would be if it hadn't been done before a few years earlier in Beowulf and then even further back than that on Lord of the Rings with Gollum. Do you remember that guy? The truth is, it's not groundbreaking at all. It's the same shit that's been done before in countless movies and countless videogames, except this time it's backed up with the added gimmick of 3D. Even then however, Beowulf and others came first and did it just as well if not better.

The 3D effects in avatar were shit, in fact I would go so far as to say they were practically nonexistant. The most impressive 3D aspect of the film were the subtitles and the previews beforehand. It made no difference to anything, it just gimmicked the film.

If people had balls they would boycott 3D and watch films with substance instead.

What's left? The acting was poor, the Na'avi were annoying as hell and let's be honest, they look fucking stupid. Oh yeah... and it got nine academy award nominations. If Best Picture doesn't go to Inglourious Basterds or one of the other nine far superior films then Avatar will have dealt a blow to cinema so heavy handed that we will be vomiting substance for a week, and when finally it's all out of our system we can watch in ignorant bliss as the next generation of 3D films rolls around and any sense of story or character is brushed aside by flashier and more elaborate gimmicks and we can giggle to ourselves and point at the glowing things as they drift in and out of the screen and yell "SHINY! SHINY!"

Fuck you James Cameron and fuck you everyone that paid to watch his shitty movie.

It's actually okay.

It’s okay to change your mind. Don’t be embarrassed about that thing that you hated with a passion for years of your life and then suddenly came to find yourself enjoying without any rational reason. There’s no self help group for that because it’s not a problem. The problem lies in your stubbornness and your inability to admit to the people around you that when you ranted and raved about how dumb it was and that they were morons for enjoying it, maybe, it wasn’t actually so bad.

It’s okay to contradict yourself. Nothing in the world has only two perspectives. There is not one single thing that can only be seen from two angles, that is relegated to the categories of a) BLACK or b) WHITE. There is nothing and for that reason you ARE going to contradict yourself and when it happens, embrace it because it’s not a bad thing. Irrationality is a way of life. Jump ship, change sides and do it without reason. People will pounce on your contradictions in arguments, as you will jump on theirs but that’s only desperation, a flash of vulnerability that can’t be passed up. Yours, theirs and my need to gloat at the besting of a fellow man in a battle of who’s RIGHT and who’s WRONG. No, fuck you! We can’t both be right, that’s PHYSICS and PHYSICS is SCIENCE and SCIENCE is FACT. I. AM. RIGHT!

It’s okay to play devil’s advocate even if you don’t mean it. (In fact it’s important!) It stretches the mind. Not yours but the minds of others, and at best it gives them a chance to argue with you and who doesn’t like a good argument. Sometimes it’s nice to play for the losing side. Always it’s challenging.

It’s okay to be wrong. At least if you can admit it.

DISCLAIMER: Everything in this article was maybe a lie. Maybe. But it probably was.

If only...

Thank god you are better than me. Honestly I don’t know what I would do without you, or even what the world would do without you. Trying to imagine a world without you is like trying to imagine how a shark would ballroom dance. Inconceivable is the word that springs to mind.

If you weren’t around to fuck your opinions down our throats and rant about every miniscule little thing that you believe everybody cares to hear, under the assumption that anything you say is correct without any sense of perspective or ability to see things from any angle other than your own then the world would surely fall apart without your presence. You are the verbal equivalent of a punch to the throat.

If only there were more people like you, enlightened with the ability to spit on us and our every attempt to better ourselves through social activities and creative outputs. If only we all realised that we were just base life forms, doomed to live a meaningless existence under your shadow. If only we were smart like you, capable of thinking for ourselves without the need for you to tell us how stupid and disgusting we are for even living.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that your inflated sense of self is a pleasure to listen to, and by pleasure I of course mean annoyance and when I say annoyance I mean I would rather wrench myself in the teeth than listen to your boring as fuck, dumb opinions. I don’t mean to be rude, but someone should also point out that you have a stupid whiny voice and you whistle through your two front teeth whenever you make a “th” sound.

News just in: Shut the fuck up news.

Dear Haiti,

I recently discovered a new found hope for you. Not a hope that my well wishes will somehow cure you of your earthquake and that if I pray hard enough and change my little internet display pictures to a picture of a dying man crushed by the debris of a fallen building, trapped between rubble and a toppled Coca-Cola billboard with some little text in the corner that says "HOPE 4 HAITI" and then email all my friends to tell them that I found out the name of a new country I never even knew existed before, that they should now also all change their display pictures and then SOMEHOW the fact that you were just hit by an earthquake that killed thousands of people and destroyed all your homes will just... fix itself. No, of course not, I mean that's stupid right?

It is a different kind of hope that you have given me. The hope that one day people will cotton on to the fact that it probably makes very little difference. After they have finished paying Brad Pitt, George Clooney and that girl who was the daughter of the country and western singer who only had one song out before everyone forgot about him, to start the bandwagon rolling, the actual impact it makes must be minimal. I can't speak for anyone else out there but personally I am an indulgent slob who was quite happy to ignore the fact that you are the poorest country that I might be able to see with a telescope if it is a really fucking good telescope and maybe I had superpowers. Up until the stupid damn news started telling everyone that something bad happened, I was completely blissful about ignoring the fact you are a country overflowing with copious amounts of political violence and oppression. But now the news has reported on it, the celebrities crawl out of the woodwork to show that they are charitable and the facebook user groups begin and all of a sudden everyone gives a flying fuck.

Thanks a lot news.

Yours sincerely,

Jake