101 Things More Productive than General Studies (Part 1)

General Studies is a pointless subject. So pointless, in fact, that I've spent the last two years compiling a list on Facebook of 101 things more productive than it. Which, in itself, is more productive than General Studies.

1. Sitting in an empty room making popping noises with one's mouth. 
2. Bread slippers.
3. Spending an entire afternoon pretending to be telepathic.
4. Getting up really early in the morning in order to pretend you are the only survivor of some great apocalypse. 
5. Spending an entire morning making up creative euphemisms for poo. 
6. Missing the sixth one out by accident, but pretending it was deliberate. 
7. Toast sandwiches.
8. Designing and constructing a submarine using only cardboard.
9. Going around the local park putting straws in all the dog turds. 
10. Going into a lift full of people and after a few seconds of silence saying "You're probably all wondering why I've gathered you here."
11. Spending twelve years of full-time compulsory education learning to read and write only to create a Facebook account and write as if you started learning ten minutes ago. 
12. Wearing a suit all day for no reason. 
13. Getting up from your seat during a general studies lesson, and running into one of the floor-to-ceiling windows in your general studies room in response to seeing some people you know walk past in the corridor.
14. Translating nursery rhymes into German using Google Translate.
    "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" in German:
    Funkeln funkeln Wenigheit Stern,
    Wie ich frage mich, wo du bist,
    Bis uber die Welt so hoch,
    Wie en Diamant am Himmel,
    Funkeln funkeln Wenigheit Stern,
    Wie ich frage mich, wo du bist.
15. Writing a song/poem about salad cream:
    http://toiletpoem.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/im-fucking-partial-to-bit-of-salad-cream.html
16. Yu-Gi-Oh!
17. Making up words that incorporate other words to make puns.
    E.g:
    Fuhrerious: Herr Hitler found out about the escaped prisoners, he's absolutely Fuhrerious.
    Tyrantial: Joseph Stalin is soaked because he got caught in the tyrantial rain.
    Hitlerious: The Nazi's tactics during the war were so bad, it was Hitlerious. 
18. Finding out how much of myself I can fit into a large-ish cardboard box without tearing the side.
19. Lying in hospital watching programs about hospitals and then being all disappointed when the hospital you're in is nothing like the hospital on the TV.
20. Combining two flavours of crisp to invent a whole new incredible flavour.
    E.g:
    Salted Cheese and Pickled Onion (Cheese and Onion and Salt and Vinegar)
    BBQ Bacon (BBQ Beef and Smokey Bacon)
    Marmite (Prawn Cocktail and Worcestershire Sauce)
    Salt and Salt and Vinegar (Ready Salted and Salt and Vinegar)
21. Running through a supermarket in your underwear shouting "Dinosaurs!"
22. Killing small animals for sport by stomping on them with large work boots.
23. Learning Wonder Mike's part of Rapper's Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang by heart.
24. Irritating the religious.
25. Failing general studies.
26. Designing and manufacturing a car with its steering wheel on its roof.
27. Attempting to snort Calpol.
28. Going to a notoriously haunted tourist attraction dressed as a cartoon ghost. 
29. Playing a game of Twat with oneself and losing. 
30. Going to the local library pretending to have Tourette's.
31. Stripping to your underwear whilst repeatedly shouting "Porn!"
32. Attempting to pass off the ingredients from a can of energy drink as a poem. 
33. Opposite bands:
    ZZ Top - AA Bottom
    Led Zeppelin - Hydrogen Unicycle
    Deep Purple - Shallow Yellow
    Fleetwood Mac - Fleetsteel PC
    Metallica - Plastica
    Lamb of God - Tofu of Satan
    Job for a Cowboy - Unemployment for an Indian
    Rush - Mosey
    Dimmu Borgir - Fuck knows.
34. Drawing on your friend's face after he's passed out and doing that creative, original, and above all inventive thing thing where you draw an arrow pointing to the nearest facial orifice and writing "Insert cock here."
35. Amusing oneself by making a noise resembling an idling tractor. 
36. Trying to see how long you can watch The Only Way is Essex before your eyes start bleeding. 
37. Being amused to no end whenever someone says "[thing] smells funny" by replacing "funny" with "like semen."
38. Making shoes out of Parmesan cheese.
39. Trying to frape someone while they're still on their fucking laptop. niggers hitler hitler
40. Chair-shuffling Olympics. 
41. Going on Dragons' Den in an attempt to persuade one of the Dragons to invest in your groundbreaking new invention; the circle.
42. Going to a really important job interview wearing a full Medieval suit of armour. 
43. Doing anything at all in a banana suit. Literally anything. 
44. My friend Adam said this when he was playing Pokémon at college: "Fuck off, you deodorant-using cuntflap-fucking prick!"
45. Vaginal euphemisms:
    The Gates to Hell
    The Magic Pink Scabbard of Destiny
    "Area 51"
    The "other" mouth.
46. Assembling a group, dressing them as Vikings, and then conquering the German Christmas market in Birmingham.
47. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) This thing, I mean seriously, what the fuck is this thing?
48. Talking like a Medieval prince for an entire day.
49. Take three men with Tourette's and send them on holiday for a week. Hilarity ensues.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtCUYUBOnzk
50. Killing small, furry animals with a mechanical vice to pass the time.
    
    I'm not even going to attempt to fit all 101 in one post. The next 51 will be in part 2 next week.
     

The College Computer Conundrum

I am writing this on my own personal desktop computer. It has a 3.60GHz AMD A8-5600K APU processor with an integrated ATi Radeon HD graphics card; it has 7.47 GB of useable RAM, it runs on Windows 8, the latest operating system from Microsoft. It’s not exactly HAL-9000 or Deep Thought, but it’s relatively powerful and does everything I ask it to.

 The potatoes they provide the students at the college I attend, however, are complete piles of arse. All of the computers at college are at least five years old, use processors less powerful than those small electric motors primary school children play with during those science lessons wherein they teach you about basic circuitry, and whoever is in charge of setting them up should be shot.

 Does this individual know what ‘screen resolution’ is? Has this person ever heard or read those words together in the same clause? The monitors these vegetables are given are old 15’’ LCD jobs, which require a screen resolution of 1024x768, or else the screen is impossible to use without acquiring a headache within the first half-hour of usage. The resolution they’ve been given is closer to 640x480, which makes the graphics look huge on the screen, which is really bloody uncomfortable to use.

That’s not the worst part, either, the worst aspect of these personal catastrophes is the sheer speed of them, or lack thereof.

 Some of them have Google’s very fast web browser, Chrome, installed on them, which is fine, until you discover that the computer is making Google Chrome run slowly. Just how bad does a computer have to be for Google Chrome, the fastest web browser there is, to be slow to load?

 I clicked on a link that was on an email I’d subscribed online for, and the page took a full three minutes to load. God forbid you try loading two tabs at the same time. You’ll be there for hours, I know I was.

The main problem is that these computers were made on the cheap, in bulk, in 2006, for educational establishments by an unknown company called ‘Stone’, who are somehow associated with Microsoft.

 These PCs were designed to run on either Windows XP or Windows Vista, which was the latest OS at the time, XP being a few years older, but the college computer people have them running on Windows 7, which they just aren’t designed to do so they can barely handle the job, and by “the job” I mean “any job”, take Microsoft Publisher, for example; if you try opening a file that’s over a couple of thousand kilobytes (which really isn’t a lot), it will take, as they say, the piss.

The actual maintenance of the tower units (main computer bits) leaves a lot to be desired. Most of them look as though they haven’t been cleaned since they were purchased however many years ago that was, and I don’t just mean the cases are a bit dusty, a computer with clean components runs much better than a computer full of dust and spiders, dead or otherwise.

 Quite a large number of keyboards have keys missing, in one case I found some of the keys had been rearranged to spell out a message I can’t repeat without disciplinary action. If a key isn’t missing, it doesn’t work, and all the keyboards are inexplicably required to have a safety warning on them, which warns you of the perils of the, apparently terrifying, office keyboard. Just how much of a slack-jawed invalid do you have to be to injure yourself using a QWERTY keyboard?

 They’re probably there so Americans can’t go on a suing spree when they deliberately break a finger while using it claiming that they weren’t expecting it to be so robust, as if they were expecting it to be made of nougat. 

Despite all of this, at least whoever set them up using the college-wide network made good use of the start menu.

 Oh hang on, no they didn’t, nine times out of ten you can’t get anything from the start menu and if you can, it’s the wrong thing, because for some reason unbeknownst to people with common sense, someone’s made it so everything has to be accessed by the desktop. Now, that seems fine when you don’t yet have anything running because you’ve just logged in, but once you’ve opened Word or Internet Explorer, you have to minimise everything before you can open any other program you might need. This is silly and time consuming if you have a lot of windows open. Which I do. All the time. As does everyone. I’ve never seen any person work on a computer in college with less than three windows open at any one time.

Imagine trying to run a game on one of those atrocities. My pride and joy does a pretty good job of running the latest releases, provided I don’t set all the graphics to ‘very high’. To run the latest releases on ‘very high’ settings and still have a playable fps rate I’d need a nuclear reactor, which I can’t afford just now.

 If I tried running Tomb Raider III, released in 1998, on a college computer, I imagine it would take several weeks to load, and have a frame rate of about 4 fph (that’s frames per hour), in spite of the game being at least seven years older than the computers themselves. 

My solution to this problem would be to ultimately employ someone to look after the computers who actually knew what they were doing. Maybe they should promote the technician in the media department for my film studies course. He works with Macs all day, which are downright impossible to work with so he’d make light work of some broken down old computers.

Maybe he’d even get them to work to the point where people could actually use them for things. You know, important college things. Stuff that matters.

Laziness and Xenophobia

If you can afford to visit one of your neighbouring countries at least once, but you don't, that's downright lazy. For instance, if you've been living in the south of England with more than enough financial means to hop on a ferry to France, you're just lazy. If you live in Seattle, in the northern United States, and it's never even crossed your mind that it might be a good idea to make the short two hour drive to Vancouver, which is barely even in Canada, you're lazy. Don't even try saying "France/Canada's shit, though." because you don't know shit because you've never fucking been there. Seriously, though, how could someone rant about how shit a particular nation is if they haven't made the effort to visit it themselves? I know people who've said "America's such a shit-hole." Really? Have you ever been? No? Then how the hell could you possibly know that? Your knowledge of America consists of what Manhattan looks like, and the orange morons on Jersey Shore.

Xenophobia still seems to run wild amongst otherwise perfectly normal people, who aren't racist or sexist, but are xenophobic because as far as society's concerned, as long as it's nothing negative about black or Asian people, calling the entire nation of France "pussies" because they pulled out of the Second World War, because all you know about the Second World War is that a German man called Hitler tried to invade England or something, so all the countries started fighting and America was late because they're fat. What you don't know is that France have won more military battles than we have, and surrendered to the Nazis because they wanted to preserve French sovereignty, so they unleashed the Free French who played a pretty big part in kicking the arses of the oppressive Nazis. As for the Americans, they were formally neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and (with Britain) invaded north Africa and Italy in 1942-43. Saying they were "late to the war" would be implying they should have been fighting a war which, to begin with, wasn't theirs to fight. What irks me about America, though, is that they seem to take personal responsibility for the allied victory, and they keep reminding us of this: "We saved your ass in WWII." "You know, if it wasn't for us, you'd be speaking German." To which I have to reply, "Well that's not strictly true, because actually, shut the fuck up." And then a Frenchman comes and says "If it wasn't for us, you'd still be under British rule."

The 'Incredible' Story of a Girl Named Gerald

On being informed of her yeast infection, Gerald couldn't stop thinking about her vagina. She would prod it and poke it and stare at it in the full-length mirror, which is for some reason in the kitchen of her Coventry bedsit, for hours on end until she got bored and eventually went and made tea. She liked her tea cold and savoury, with a good pinch of salt, a crack or two of black pepper, and a nice little dollop of Hellmann's mayonnaise.
          Gerald, you see, is a bit odd. A bit of a maverick. Somewhat strange. I mean, for a start, she's a girl and her name is Gerald, so you immediately know she's going to be a tad different. Poor Gerry was eaten alive at school; and at college; and indeed at university, where she's studying something. She never tells people quite exactly what she's studying, but she it's definitely a subject, and almost certainly an art subject. Not least because she spends most of her spare time rolling around on an empty canvas, completely nude, covered in various condiments and spreads. Last week it was wholegrain mustard. Her parents, as you've probably gathered, are evil. Not least because they (not accidentally) named their only daughter 'Gerald', but because they're also extremely racist, anti-Semitic, and they delight in killing newborn kittens. I may have made that last one up, but that doesn't take anything away from my point, which is that they're evil. Gerald hasn't spoken to her parents since she gained the ability to talk, aged eight; her parents also only speak German, which, curiously, she does not.
          Recently, Gerry met a strapping young gentleman, over the internet, called Susan. Gerald was overjoyed to meet somebody who seemed to be in the same predicament as her, and relished the prospect of possibly meeting Susan in the near future. The only thing in their way was Wales, the Atlantic ocean, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and her crippling yeast infection, but ever determined Gerald wasn't going to let her itchy willy-warmer get in the way of meeting her one true love face-to-face, then presumably, after a few drinks and a Barry White record, face-to-penis.  
          Eventually, Gerald raised enough money to pay for economy class tickets to New Orleans, and enough Vagisil to see her through the flight. When she touched down on the warm, southern tarmac, she was overcome with joy, and an insufferable itching sensation in her Cameron. Her yeast problem was now so bad, she swore blind that the discharge flowing freely from her opening was dry stout. When she saw Susan in all his glory, she ran to his embrace. He held her for what seemed like hours, until Susan let out the most awe-inspiring bottom cough which would astonish even the most seasoned care-home worker. They locked eyes and gazed at each others' souls. Well, three of their eyes locked, as Gerald has a lazy eye which seems to dart from object to object as though it has ADHD. The moment was somewhat ruined by Gerald scratching her vagina, so the two went back to Susan's condo in New Orleans' Uptown.
          Kittens were just about everywhere in Susan's condo. They occupied more of his life than anything else; they were his only friends until now. Mind you, he did have upwards of twenty kittens, so he could have said he had plenty of friends, but he'd have had nobody to say it to. The felines seemed less attracted to the beery aroma emanating from Gerald's ham wallet than almost all people were to her almost legendary social awkwardness. Gerald wasn't interested in the cats, she just wanted to get right to it, and (incredibly giving not a single fuck about Gerald's yeast issue) get right to it they did.
          I'm going to skip over the naughty bits, because I'm not E. L. James, so I wouldn't know how best to describe the repugnant scenes in detail so as not to make you, the humble reader, lose the entire contents of your digestive system.
          Later that week, Gerald was due to return to Coventry leaving Susan behind. Both Gerry and Sue were sad to part ways, but at least they'd had a week of... of... of that. When Gerald returned to the UK, she though of Susan daily. She thought of his name, his horde of kittens, his extensive collections of dragon dildos and Fedoras. She liked his Fedoras so much she took to wearing one of her own, thus being further shunned by society. Gerald missed Susan, but was at least safe in the knowledge that someone, somewhere, had finally penetrated her peachy pocket.
          Like it or not, you're now imagining a girl with a yeast infection and a lazy eye being skullfucked by man called Sue wearing a Fedora, and if you're reading this and your name is Damon, please be so kind as to read the first letter of each paragraph. Thank you.  

"Totally Unacceptable"

So it's been snowing here in England, and many millions of balls of the stuff have been hurled around in frivolous joy as a result. Harmless fun, right? Wrong. According to my college, it is 'totally unacceptable' to throw snowballs (or "snowballing" as they like to call it, as if it were some kind of violent sport).

Now, my college has always been a bit confused as to what is and what isn't as they say 'totally unacceptable'; just recently they banned people trying to give up smoking from smoking e-lites inside the building, so they have to go outside to give up smoking around a bunch of people with real cigarettes, blowing real smoke into their real faces. The reason for which still hasn't been specified, and probably never will be. Cadbury College, let me be the first to indirectly tell you that throwing snowballs is not something that people consider 'totally unacceptable'. Kicking someone in the balls is totally unacceptable; stabbing someone in the face is totally unacceptable; eating a live child for attention is totally unacceptable and a bit illegal, but throwing balled snow, unpleasant though it may sometimes be, is not totally unacceptable.

It's not that I don't like my college, and I do enjoy going and everything, it's just that some of the emails we (the students) receive are a bit silly, case and point: "Beyond a certain "late" time students will not be allowed to enter a classroom."
Why the hell did our vice principal decide to put late in quotation marks? As if the word 'late' is slang, or something.

On that note, I'd like to propose the world's first international Snowballing league. Any takers?
Poo willy bum tits.

Merry Fucking Christmas!!

So it's Christmas Day, and it's pretty safe to say I've had a fucking marvelous day. I've received many fantastic gifts from my family, had easily the largest and best meal I've had since the last Christmas meal I had, and I'm now sitting here, looking at my beautiful new monitor, listening to Rush through my wonderful new headphones, sipping a pint of festive spiced apple and rhubarb cider, which tastes interesting to say the least.

I really do like Christmas, in case you hadn't noticed, or thought I spent my entire year being a skeptical git. Which, to be honest, I kind of do. Except around birthdays and Christmas.

This isn't going to be a long post, I just wanted to wish my very small audience a merry Christmas, you beautiful motherfuckers. In a couple of days, I'm going to be getting absolutely sausaged with some friends, which will be fucking mental in the face, and then on Friday I'm going to have several very young seconds cousins in my room, which I've had to child-proof (which, if you haven't read any previous posts, involves covering up all the Swastikas and removing any metal spiky things I have lying around) which took way more work than I initially thought, but by the good grace of Thor's mighty hammer, it's worth it.

May your holidays be fucking badass as all shit.

P.S:
A few corrections:
A couple of posts back, I said Christmas was looming over us like the Burj Hotel in Abu Dhabi. That was embarrassingly wrong, what I meant was the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. There, now I don't look racist or ignorant.

Also, just one correction.
Penis

Apocalypse? More Like Apoca-Bullshit... Or Something

So it's December 22nd, 2012, and the world hasn't ended like the Mayans said it would. They said (along with a load of paranoid Americans) that the world would end on the day of winter solstice in the year 2012, which was yesterday; so for the past couple of years or so, people have been shitting themselves because they thought the world was going to come to an end in a spectacular explosion, or something. The Mayans even accounted for all the timezones by not giving a specific time, they just said "The 21st." In reality, very few people actually believed that it was Armageddon, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse were going to rise from Hell on their fire-retardant horses and claim people's soles, or rape all the women who sinned, or some shit like that, and Cthulu and Jesus' evil twin brother Horace will come and do whatever the opposite of blessing people is.

The best part of this whole 2012 thing, by a country mile, is the fact that these conspiracy theorists aren't just going to give up and do something productive with their lives, oh no; they've only gone and postponed the bloody apocalypse, haven't they? It's now on September 3rd, 2015, all because they claim the Mayans made a mistake. "What? The world hasn't ended? We're all still alive? That's impossible! The Mayans said, thousands of years ago, that the world would cease to be on this very day, and it hasn't. The only logical conclusion must be that they made a mistake. It must be in 2015 or something. Yes, that's right, it's in September, three years from now. Silly Mayans."

"So what's going to happen in October 2015?" You may very well be asking. Well, my inquisitive friend, the simple answer is, they're probably going to set the date back even further, like they keep doing with the rapture, so this apocalypse crap isn't going to go away for a very long time because neither are stupid people.

Fuck's sake.