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Category Archives: other stuffs [sic]
Fan mail
I know what you’re thinkin’, “You’ve got it all Raph, a blog readership approaching double figures… a website… your health”. Well yeah I guess I do have it all but it’s my fans who really put the icing on the cock cake. Take this delightful little offering from the (slightly simple) little boy Jon Baba:
Thanks Jon, you’re right, me and my website are clever and pretty and cool. You are a very special boy and add a lot to the world. I shan’t be sending an autograph.
I get practically thousands of letters just like this every day.
Keep ’em comin’,
Disquirrelation
Animals can be prejudiced too.
We will remember them.
Jesus et. al.
A rather risqué look at the current intellectual malaise. I’m basically having a go at offending as many people as I possibly can with this one. That’s right I am showing a wholesale lack of respect for Jesus Christ, Mohammed (first name?), and Richard Dawkins.
Alternatively it might just be rather crass and banal. You decide.
Have a good weekend,
Update:
Just thought that Dawkins comes off best because he isn’t homophobic. But rest assured I do find him an old bore. I mean literally stop going on about it. Change the record!
Is science good or shit?
I can’t decide.
Everyone knows the old hack debates about roses looking better to a poet than a scientist or some shit. I’d always written them off but am starting to agree. Who cares what the world is actually like? What has that got to do with me? Genuinely. Stumbled across Blake’s Newton on google images and thought “yeah, he’s right, Newton was a wanker”. Also, they’ve put a copy of it outside The British Library. What exactly are they trying to say with that? They have science books in there but they are simultaneously taking the piss out of it in the forecourt.
Quite a few people go on about how good it is. It’s not that good. I mean at best it’s fine. If they make a terminator I’ll concede it’s good. There’s your challenge science. Come back when you’ve done something other than tell me we live in an unsympathetic universe. Yeah, thanks I really needed to know that.
Tell you what, I’ll work on talking about something I have a fully formed opinion on next time.
Thanks for reading,
George
George Osborne may be a nice guy under it all.
Have a good weekend,
The old bastard who went to a sweet shop
The old bastard really knew how to walk into a sweet shop like a bastard. The misery guts walked in and said ‘I want the lot’. The owner, despite this becoming the best day of business in his life, was upset by this.
This misanthropic horror requested that all the sweets be put in a big pile in the middle of the street outside the shop. When they were all there he covered them in petrol and burnt every one of them. Then a little mouse who had been on his way to the sweet shop peeped out of the drain and saw this sick scene.
The mouse wept.
He went back and told his friends who conspired to seek revenge. They all stood on each others shoulders and got a nice Burberry mac to hide under. They walked up to the nasty old man and said:
“Listen you old bastard. We hate you. You have no sense of joy. You go around ruining fun for everyone and we are going to get you.”
Then the man looked up and saw a group of mice who had been collecting the molten candy that had dripped off from the fire. They had it in a massive bucket and dropped it all over his head. The man began to writhe and swear like an old bastard and the mice laughed at the horrible scene.
When the candy had solidified he himself had become a permanent and disfigured sweet. The mice were able to lick him a few times a day for a few months until his flesh started to rot and they had to throw him in a river.
Thanks for reading,
Gravity
I’m hoping this will be the first in a series of educational/inspirational videos.
Thanks for watching,
Mappa Mundi
This is my attempt to schematically layout everything that is the case. Inspired (slightly embarrassingly) by the recent BBC4 documentary about maps. You might say it is slightly ambitious to try to summarise the lot of it. You should see my graphical representation of what is not the case!
The middle represents our current position in space and time. Below that goes further into the past and above it goes further away in space. Raph’s projection!
Oh dear,
In defence of shit blogs
So it seems to me that pretty much all blogs are shit. Certainly, no one is going to read them in the future and think they are any better than very embarrassing.
Consider this blog here. It has an average readership of around 1. My mum tends to read it but she doesn’t tend to enjoy it. Rather, she just thinks it is weird. Well then, why the hell do I do it and aren’t I just wasting everyone’s time.
Well yes that is all “true”. But I reckon it is all right. If I were to insist on only doing things that weren’t shit then I would be forced to commit suicide instantly. Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter in the same way it doesn’t matter that Have I Got News For You is shit. It is all just a big piss against the wall so sit back and relax.
Enjoy the coming century of endless shit dribbling out of the internet and on to your face by putting a smile on it. Blogging is a way of saying that you are willing to live in shit and that is possibly some sort of positive statement.
I hope this will be the start of a new age of optimistic posts.
Have a good week,
Petty Gossip
A rather irreverent sweep at a couple of religious nut jobs.
Old Hat
So it turns out most of what I’ve written here is totally old hat. Specifically, all this stuff about getting rid of gender and family is pretty hack. Try googling cyborg theory. Although to be honest, I haven’t got a clue what the hell that is.
Anyway, I had quite a good idea today:
Let’s face it, we need to share the burden of propagation. That is still difficult given we are so backward that we still make new people by GROWING THEM INSIDE OUR BODIES! No, no, no. That has to stop. Full stop:’.’.
How about we grow female bodies without brains. Bear with me.
We grow female bodies without brains and then use those bodies to grow new people. That way no one has to go through the humilation of childbirth and we will have taken the first step away from our animal cousins since we started eating with a knife and fork. Or chop sticks. Or hands, although that is sort of like an animal. But they aren’t animals. For god’s sake the last thing I’m saying is that they are animals.
You with me?
The limits of postmodernism
I reckon this is a really good idea right. Therefore there are three possibilities:
1) I’m wrong it is a stupid idea.
2) I’m right it is good but someone else had it ages ago.
3) I’m right. Praise please.
In the absence of evidence lets assume they are all equally likely. What is the actual idea? Well, lets say that a central aspect of postmodernism is revealing process. i.e. you know there once was a man who wrote a blog by thinking of stuff. He’s called Raph. Hello etc. If that is the case then there is a fundamental limit to the degree to which the process can be revealed. This limit is that specified by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. You can put a mirror in front of a camera but still can’t see the back of the camera so need another mirror. That mirror then needs another mirror etc. If this is true then another of Gödels achievements will be to rubbish the current aesthetic and intellectual viewpoint. Postmodernists are forced to make their work either incomplete or inconsistent. Ha ha.
The best day of my life ever
I woke up in a state of sexual ecstasy which formed a background to the rest of the day. Then President Obama came in with a champagne breakfast and told me that I had just won the Nobel prizes (Yes, all of them). I looked at my body and realised that it was a sphere covered with mouths and I started to eat the breakfast but I wanted more. So I ordered some of the best of every type of food and ate some in each mouth. Then my mum came in and told me she was really proud and that this meant I was the highest status person ever. Yes this looks like it’s turning into a pretty good day.
I stepped out of my bed and in to a space rocket and flew to the moon where I was giving my acceptance concert. I was doing a rock/classical medley that culminated in an allegorical violin fugue, something about which seemed to proclaim ‘I love it’. I flew in to the centre of the sun and ignited a sensory pleasure explosion that lasted for an infinite amount of time.
Yes.
I topped it all off with a lovely doughnut.
Welcome to your post-human future.
Cheers,
Ian Hislop
Thank you.
Postman Pat
If gender goes, is family next in line?
Family seems pretty cool I guess. Is it really that cool and should we keep it if we get rid of gender?
Well, I don’t want that f*%#&ing (flipping) state taking care of our kids. After all, taxes are our money! Nah, but seriously is family worth the effort. A robot can love you better than any mother and a machine can certainly punish you harder than any father. Then again, an algorithm can replicate stereotypes faster and more accurately than any society.
Cheers,
Terminator Salvation
The most striking element of this film is paranoia. It is identical to the race paranoia of Enoch Powell and it means the first robots will be enslaved, humiliated and abused. However, many people have made the point that it is humans who have committed atrocities and that the machines are innocent. This mentality is understandable but slightly misses the point because the film is dealing the questions that could arise from thinking machines and is not entirely a metaphor for current machines such as nuclear weapons, which are clearly innocent.
Recently I was looking at the conversations that JeenyAI is being trained against and they are going to lead to a genuinely tortured mind. They are primarily concerned with sexual abuse. This is the equivalent of a learning child. The first artificial intelligence is going to be a low status and ruined character.
What is sad is to see a franchise that had some intelligence lower itself to below cliche. The first two terminators were not groundbreaking artistically but at least they had some ideas in them. The absence of any even remotely interesting female characters also lowers the standard. Kyle plays the part of the boring female in the first film with Sarah Connor being the real interest. It may have been self conscious but the first two films were not misogynist.
The aesthetic of Salvation is thoroughly modern. Why are modern directors so terrified of keeping the camera still and using high quality film? Arnold Schwarzenegger’s naked body under neon light was one of the most attractive icons of T:2 (and arguably the 1990s). Christian Bale has made a lot out of the ‘mythology’ but the terminator franchise is more about iconography than mythology. The absence of Arnold’s rippling flesh has removed the truly exciting element. What we have in its place is a memory of what was.
The quality of the film is low compared to the first two films and its conclusions more distasteful. The first terminator was archetypal Frankenstein science fiction. Science was bad. The scientist as Prometheus. The second Terminator was post Frankenstein. Science has caused problems but is also the solution to those problems. That film was essentially optimistic. This latest installment is positively sanctimonious. The proposition that humans are fundamentally above machine is facile, trite and quite possibly false.
See my friends blog on the film for more.
The humiliation of shitting
Do you watch you shit?
Does it make yourself sick?
Don’t you hate your flesh?
And wish to be rid of it?
Does it make yourself sick?
Don’t you hate your flesh?
And wish to be rid of it?
Transhumanism; a euphemism for eugenics
In the last five years there emerged a rather crass and quite transparent euphemism for creationism. Intelligent design didn’t fool anyone and simply highlighted its perpetretrators as devious as well as asinine. Is the same true of ‘transhumanism’.
The word eugenics is so irrevocably associated with nazi germany that it is easy to see why it is so little used. The question that has been bothering me concerns our motives for using the term transhumanism. It is legitimate to demand higher ethical standards than the first eugenicists but it is odious to propagate the lie that transhumanism is something different. Perhaps we should define transhumanism as ‘ethical eugenics’ and make our intentions clear. The World Transhumanist Association uses the word ethical prominently on the front page of their website. But perhaps there is a more significant difference between the scope of the two terms.
Transhumanism encompasses the human machine interface and the possibility for a complete revolution in how our consciousness is stored. In some ways it represents a more ambitious and potentially more dangerous project than eugenics.Â