World of Warcraft : Some Chuck Norris Facts.

Last month, Blizzard was caught up in something of a backlash, after they promoted the antics of George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, screening a rather pathetic homophobic rant at Blizzcon, and holding him up as a model player.

Suffice it to say, Blizzard were forced to apologise:

Dear members of the Blizzard community,

I have read your feedback and comments about this year’s BlizzCon, and I have also read the feedback to the apology from Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftain. I’d like to respond to some of your feedback here.

As president of Blizzard, I take full responsibility for everything that occurs at BlizzCon.

It was shortsighted and insensitive to use the video at all, even in censored form. The language used in the original version, including the slurs and use of sexual orientation as an insult, is not acceptable, period. We realize now that having even an edited version at the show was counter to the standards we try to maintain in our forums and in our games. Doing so was an error in judgment, and we regret it.

The bottom line is we deeply apologize for our mistakes and for hurting or offending anyone. We want you to have fun at our events, and we want everyone to feel welcome. We’re proud to be part of a huge and diverse community, and I am proud that so many aspects of the community are represented within Blizzard itself.

As a leader of Blizzard, and a member of the band, I truly hope you will accept my humblest apology.

– Mike Morhaime President, Blizzard Entertainment

A good apology, all things considered. Blizzard understood that making a group of players feel unwelcome based on their religion, sexuality, or ethnicity is wrong, not to mention bad for the bottom line.

Then this came along:


It was nice of Siegfried and Roy to lend Chuck a tiger.

Chuck Norris, the favourite meme of the late 90’s, and top Barrens-chat topic, starring in the latest World of Warcraft commercial. I’m amazed that he agreed to do it, considering how he usually feels about any book or game that has “false gods” in it. I would guess the difference is that this one happened to offer him a heap of money.

Chuck Norris is an actor, and the subject of an undeserved craze. He also writes a weekly column in which, in 2008, he wrote this:

Lastly, I was appalled when I read the American Family Association report that on Friday, April 25, several thousand schools across the nation will be observing a “Day of Silence,” or DOS, which is a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools. (DOS is sponsored by an activist homosexual group – the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.)

Is encouraging or teaching about homosexuality what our forefathers expected for the public education they founded? Even the most liberal among them opposed it. For example, Thomas Jefferson drafted a bill concerning the criminal laws of Virginia, in which he proposed that the penalty for sexual deviance should be unique corporal punishment. Jefferson’s views were indeed representative of early America.

“Whosoever shall be guilty of rape, polygamy, or sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least” (Bill 64, 1779). Can you imagine a statesman proposing such a law today?

While I’m not of course espousing such treatment, I do believe that we should equally and adamantly oppose such aberrant sexual behaviour from being condoned or commemorated in our public schools through textbooks or a so-called “Day of Silence.”

The Day of Silence is “a day of action in which students across the country take some form of a vow of silence to call attention to the silencing effect of anti-LGBT bullying and harassment in schools.”. Young gay people are 4 times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers. That’s why the “It Gets Better” campaign was launched. But Chuck opposes young people being told that it’s OK to be gay. He’s not saying they should be castrated. Oh no, no, no. He’s just saying that being gay is equivalent to being a rapist and that we should oppose gayness with a fervour *equal* to castration and/or nose mutilation.

He’s also a supporter of the insidious and lucrative reparative therapy industry, which claims to be able to pray people straight. Then again, he also thinks that vaccination programmes are a government conspiracy. He’s Michelle Bachmann with kung-fu grip. Feel free to have a rummage through his writings, here.

I understand why Blizzard hired Chuck Norris. He is an internet icon. But he is also an extremist, and any company that is truly “proud to be part of a huge and diverse community” should have stayed the hell away from him.

He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake.

I keep seeing this advert at the moment. Cisco’s David Hsieh, talking about the future:

Update: Whoops. Darn thing autoplays. I’ll put it after the fold.
Continue reading He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake.

World of Lordcraft Shuts Down – An UNPRECEDENTED Epic Cockup?

(Update: As of the 19th of January, the website seems to have returned to life. I guess someone finally remembered to pay their domain registration fee!)

This won’t come as any great surprise to those who followed my posts on Lordcraft:

World of LordCraft – Evony decides to take on Blizzard

World of LordCraft – Don’t Play, My Lord.

To recap, it was an Evony-clone (I believe by the same people who make Evony) that “borrowed” liberally from World of Warcraft. I strongly recommend reading those old posts to see quite how hilariously shameless the entire business was. I’ll just repost the original trailer, mostly so that the title of this article doesn’t look quite so random!
Continue reading World of Lordcraft Shuts Down – An UNPRECEDENTED Epic Cockup?

Charmin Ultra: An incredibly tone-deaf commercial.

I saw this for the first time earlier while watching some MSNBC online, which likes to give me US advertising, and felt compelled to track it down to show you.

Nice timing on your advert, Charmin Ultra. If there’s anything that America needs to see more of at the moment, it is fish flopping around in brown muck. Who needs wetlands anyway?

Maybe you could donate a few tonnes of your amazingly absorbent tissue to clean up the blasted oil.

Thou shalt not take the name of Optimus Prime in vain, nor usurp his copyrighted likeness.

Shipping containers. They’re ubiquitous, be they filled with frozen lamb, children’s clothing, or some plastic crap destined for Walmart. Or are they filled with doom? Beware, as from now on, shipping containers are… MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE!

Somewhere in Russia, a new plot is born. Well, not so much a plot as a marketing video for weapons of doom from munitions firm Novator. It has better production values than most Saturday morning cartoon shows.

Seriously, who decided that selling shipping containers that transform into cruise missile launchers on the open market was a good idea? This is a genuine product being shown off at the Defence Services Asia exhibition in Malaysia. I sure wouldn’t want to be the blue coloured country in that video. Team blue are clearly the bad guys for having their weapons of mass destruction in plain sight, not like team red, who kept their military build-up a complete secret. Thanks, Novator!

It’s a genuinely awful idea that does nothing to make the world a safer place. Not to mention that somewhere, someone is yelling “I said I wanted to go on a cruise with Club Med, not get a cruise missile from Club-K!”. They’re retailing at between 10 and 20 million dollars, depending on what optional extras you go for, putting them in the price range of almost any evil genius, plus they’re very easy to ship!

What offends me most of all though is how they have blatantly made the truck look like Optimus Prime, bringing the greatest hero of my generation into disrepute. The Autobot leader is a being of infinite courage and wisdom who would have no part in this scheme. I suspect a Decepticon plot. Unwise to mess with The Prime, in this earthling’s opinion. For he is…. MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE!

Stephenie Meyer is still not dead!

Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series, was not dead in April when last the rumour went around, and she is not dead now either. Seriously, internets, stop saying people are dead when they’re not.

The only reason I care about this is that I have a number of friends who ill-advisedly buy into the whole Twilight thing, and every time she dies they get terribly upset, and insist on telling me about it. Though it does kind of make me look pretty amazing every time I prove to them that she is, in fact, still amongst the living, as if I’d personally whipped out a scroll of “raise dead” and revivified her.

Ms Meyer’s official website has the following statement:

Hey everybody. I just received a call from Stephenie and she wanted me to let everyone know that, contrary to some rumors that have recently started circulating, she is alive and well.

Have a great day.

So that’s that.

I am, of course, glad to hear that she is doing well. I’d be gladder if she promised to stop writing far-right religious allegories dressed up as teen-fiction, but I suspect I will remain disappointed in that regard. Apparently abstinence-only sells every bit as well as sex these days.

MEP Daniel Hannan lies about the UK on US Television for money.

While socialised medicine is considered with great mistrust in the US, here in the UK, no political party would dare to suggest that the dear old NHS should be replaced. Unless, of course, they didn’t think anyone from Britain would notice.

In this clip, UK Conservative, MEP Daniel Hannan, holds court with the crown prince of right-wing crazy, Glenn Beck.

You would not think it to listen to Hannan and his FOX friends, but we do actually also have private medicine here. It’s much cheaper than the US, of course, because they have to compete with the NHS, but if you have the money, you can still buy whatever healthcare you desire. You can also buy painkillers pretty much anywhere. Hannan’s “friend” that claims that NHS staff got aggressive with him for trying to buy painkillers is either fictional, or not telling the whole story. Also, those prostate cancer survival rate claims have been debunked so many times (they’re measured totally differently in the different countries so have no relation to eachother), nobody with any respect for their audience ought to be trotting them out. Ah right, I forgot, it’s Glenn Beck.

Daniel Hannan is of course the man who famously insisted that the BNP is a party of the far-left. He has clearly learned from Beck, who is equally happy to claim that the Nazi party was left wing, as part of the “liberal fascism” smear.

Why is Daniel Hannan still a member of the Conservative party? This man is getting a platform because of his membership of a mainstream party, and is using it to be paid to tell the most grievous lies about the UK, and Europe. Lies that would not be tolerated here.

Yesterday he found a new friend, Mr Hannity. Apparently he is spending a great deal of time in the US campaigning against healthcare reform. Do the people who elected him to the European parliament realise this is how he is spending his time? How much money is he making from his disloyal behaviour?

Dear US readers. Daniel Hannan is a liar being paid to lie, and you should not place any stock in his words. The leader of his party, David Cameron, has said in response “I support the NHS 100% and the Conservative Party supports the NHS 100%. We are the party that gives the biggest amount of support to the NHS. It is incredibly important to my family. It is incredibly important to this country.”.

That’s all very well, Mr Cameron, but Mr Hannan is not doing his job, and making the UK look bad in the eyes of America. Kick him out.

I should thank him, I suppose, for making me sufficiently angry to end a month-long lack of posting!