The Subject of Homosexuality

OK, let's put a few things into place before going "Oh my god he's talking about Homosexuality, he must be GAY!!! D:", firstly I am not homosexual, gay or whatever you want to call it, I prefer women, plain and simple. But this blog post is simply here to put my views about homosexuality and why it's not a bad thing...

With the internet being the internet, a tool for communication across countries and cultures, it's great to know that it's used to get along with like-minded people, however my experience with the internet for the last 5 or 6 years has been a bit of a shaky one. Back in 1994 when the internet started, it was believed that the internet would be a haven of free speech to many people, including those of countries that might not have as much as the western world has, unless you're from China were Twitter is banned and blocked, but during the rise of Youtube I started to notice the rise in hatred towards others, be cultural differences or something petty like not agreeing in someone's opinion. But there was a trend where people accuse others of homosexuality because of ridiculous reasons; that or racist remarks towards Jewish and Muslim people. But one subject that appears on Youtube, and the internet in general is homosexuality of other people and how it's either OK or a bad thing. If it's an article, a video, or a recording that against the subject it gets bad, and fundamental religion rears it's ugly face into the scene and spews hatred towards homosexuality.

The hatred is pretty much towards the idea that said religion says that since homosexuality is bad, the people think they need to protest the idea and make sure that people are heterosexual, to confirm to their beliefs. The best example to pick here is the Phelp's Family Westboro Church, a group of people who have gone as far as turning homophobia into misanthropy, I won't delve into the misanthropic part too much, but the family go around and picket funerals of homosexuals and try to stop events that have homosexuality in it. The problem being is that they go a bit too far in the sense that they send letters to families saying that their son/daughter is going to hell because of their homosexuality. Which is incredibly crass and not forgiveable at all.

Thing is, there needs to be a reason for why these people would think like this, and cause the hatred. It's pretty simple if you think to yourself as if you are a god. Lets take 4 people, 3 of which are men, and there's 1 women, all 4 of these people are over 18, virgin, clean, sexually active, and in love. One man picks the woman, and the remaining men pick each other in a moment of love and romance through their sexuality, fast forward to 9 months later, to heterosexual couple have a child, but the homosexual couple don't, now if you're a God, you'd want more people to worship you, so why allow homosexuality to happen when it doesn't reproduce? This is why most religions detest to homosexuality, because it doesn't increase the population for said religion, which back in ancient days made sense since it's guranteed the human race to continue with a low population and high chances of getting diseases, but in the modern world? This becomes a little flawed...

First off, the 20th century brought a lot of medical advances into the world, the child death rate dramatically reduced in the western world and life expectancy increased higher and higher. In 1900, it was recorded the the world population was 1 billion people, but 100 years later in 2000, it blew up 6 times to 6 billion! And yet somehow homophobia still exists...

The chances of homosexuality dropping the human population is pretty much non exist, and even to this day the world population still growing, if maybe it's too much, but I'll talk about that some other time. Just because homosexual people exist it doesn't mean that the population is going to drop. However that's not always the reason for why people are homophobic. From what I've observed in life, people don't really think about "God's need of population", more that people believe that it's "filthy" because of the act of homosexual sex between men. I mean yes, thinking about it does cause issues such as hygiene and disease, the irony is that what can be "filthy" about homosexual sex, heterosexual sex can be just as "filthy". I have heard plenty of men describing about how they have anal sex with their girlfriends; the funny thing about this is that a typical man believes that it's "filthy" for 2 men to enjoy anal sex, but somehow it's totally fine if it's between a man and a woman, despite the fact that it's the SAME ACT. I personally think it's hypocritical that men can think like that, sure not all men do, but I have witnessed males boasting about it and being tempted to call them a hypocrite.

In general, homosexuality isn't something to be scared of. It's not going to kill the world, and can be done in loving in clean ways just like how a heterosexual relationships can be. As long as we can prevent religion kicking in and/or spewing hatred towards others, we can realise that it's no different at all. I've met homosexual people and they're nothing different as a person, just their sexuality, they don't all dress up like the Village people, they're not all into cottaging, and they're not all into being campy. You might found out that they act pretty much the way you expect others to act and may even share interests with you, you don't need to worry about them trying to hit on you, they already know that you're straight, so they won't. Simple as that!

Just adding this in here because it's funny! heh!

Memoirs of a Gamer: The Genesis (No, not the Sega console...)

Ok, for those who may not (or even may) know, I'm a bit of a gaming fanatic... I now possess more than 1000 games, 13 TV consoles (from different generations of course), 10 portable consoles, a Gaming PC, an old Mac, a Commodore 64 and an Android phone. Here I'll be writing about how I came to love gaming and how I grew up with it...

So, how did I begin my love for video games? It all began in 1989 when my family and I went on what I remember as our first holiday (vacation to the American readers) in the UK. For those who haven't read the previous blogs, I lived in a few European countries as my Dad was in the American Navy. We went to Caister-on-Sea in Norfolk. as a young kid at five, I was really excited to be at the seaside, but unforntunity there were plenty of distractions at the Holiday park to make me not wanting to go to the Seaside!

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As my grandparents, went to the bingo hall, there's a hall before you enter it, and in that hall had a plethora of Arcade machines. There was a welcoming as I walked through the door, the lights, the sounds, and the colours, I was in a wonder land that I've seen before; bare in mind I wasn't ignorant, I knew they were video games, I knew about them before I walked through that door, I heard of games like Pac Man and Space Invaders, but I never played them before; and this was an opportunity not to miss!

Out of the games that I played, three stand out of my mine, Atari Star Wars, Karate Champ, and Sky Kid, I remember seeing a broken and glitchy racing game with a sit down cock pit and steering wheel, but I could never find it's name, nor could I remember it.

I would just love to own one of these machines one day!

Atari Star Wars was an obvious reason to scream in glee, being five and seeing a Star Wars video game where you pilot an X-Wing through the Death Star trenches was amazing, it's every Star Wars kids dream to be like Luke Skywalker and blow up the Death Star! The machine itself was a sit-down cockpit type where you feel like you're sitting inside an X-Wing, you had the Flight yoke in front of you, and the inside of the cockpit had faux control panel with coloured buttons and displays. The game itself was displayed on a vector display, similar to the ones you see on heart rate monitors, but unlike most vector monitors, that could only run on a single colour, this machine could display about 8 different colours, and was able to model three dimensional objects, something that conventional raster displays couldn't do yet. It was a machine quite ahead of it's time. To this day I find it hard that I played a 3D game before people started to use polygons!

How can you NOT love this when you're five!

Sky Kid is an interesting game, since it was a game as you play as a rookie pilot on a mission to drop a bomb on an enemy base. The game may have look simple, but for the five year old mind it was a little bit over my head. The game itself was a side scrolling shooting game, in similar vein to RType and Gradius, a game where you fly from one side of the screen, the screen scrolls, and you shoot on coming enemies that either try to shoot you down or try to crash into you. What made this different to other Side Scrolling shooters was that typically, the screen would scroll from left to right, but Sky Kid scrolled right to left, and had a method of avoiding bullet fire by performing a loop by moving the joystick in the circular motion very quickly. To be honest it's not a great game, nothing to fuss about, it's just that I remember me and my Dad taking turns to see who could get to level 2, and it didn't happen. :(

I don't think we even this far in the game! But yeah, you had to pick up a bomb, and drop it on an enemy base.

The game I played the most on my Holiday was Karate Champ! As a kid I loved the Karate Kid movies, so seeing a game where you spar with another person was a cool idea, and I had to play it! What was even cooler was the fact that they made more than one of these machines! Just not in the same place... One was in the Bingo Hallway, one was in the cafeteria in the swimming pool, and the other was in a shack next to a stall that served ice cream. Each time I saw these machines I begged my parents and grandparents to allow me to play the machine, and sometimes I won my way! :P I wasn't very good at it, after all being five you're not going to be that great at video games. But I love being able to punch and kick my opponent to the floor, but what was even better was getting to a level where you would fight someone, standing on a huge log that would stretch across a mountain. The whole idea in my head was amazing, and I just wanted to play it over and over again. What's amazing is that this is the game that started the fighting genre, many people disagree and believe it's a game called Yi Air Kung Fu, a game by Konami in 1985 , but AVJapan released Karate Champ in 1984, the earliest date for any fighting game, meaning that Karate Champ is the Grandfather of the Fighting game Genre, that would eventually bring about games such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, King of Fighters, Tekken and many more!

At five years old, this is something to live for! lol! :D

Amazingly, you can play Karate Champ on the iPhone/iPodTouch/iPad for an increbily low price of 69p! Now I wish I had an iPodTouch to play it!

Picture of the iPad version with 2 player gameplay!