#8: Gadgets are my real children (or, Mashood reviews the SGS III)

The Samsung Galaxy S III is the greatest phone I have ever had the pleasure of owning, touching, or hearing about.


First and foremost, let's get the empirical specs out of the way by saying; the SGS III outdoes all its current competitors currently on the market (The HTC One X and the iPhone 4s, specifically). Although the HTC1X has a 1.5GHz quad-core processor compared to the SGSIII's 1.4, it simply does not match the SGSIII's processor's performance. For more details, I highly recommend you check out that link.


This is a review about how I feel about it, not about what is objectively true. As such, I begin by telling you that before you buy it, go out and have a feel of one yourself.

Look (hardware)

I ordered mine in Pebble Blue, despite the expected 10-day delay on delivery from Optus. It is majestic. Under some lights, it looks like that blue colour the sky takes on before a brilliant thunderstorm, under others it's a noble purple, and under others still, it's polished silvery-steel. Despite being all plastic, the polished metal look for its finish is really impressive, and gives the phone a really nice look. The giant screen obviously takes pride of place on the front, yet there is enough room around the edges to not make it look garish. Overall, the phone's look ties in perfectly with what can only be assumed to be Samsung's latest design philosophy; nature. The phone looks very much like the archetype of one of these pebbles. And feels just as good.

Feel (hardware)

When I first held this phone, I knew that everything was going to be alright. While the polished metal look may make it seem cold, metallic and precise, the smooth plastic covering all the way around seems to absorb the negative energy around it, making you feel like what owning a Prius must feel like. "But Mashood, it's got a 4.8" screen, which must be really uncomfortable to hold!" I had similar apprehensions, esteemed reader. Coming from the already-criticised-for-being-too-big Samsung Galaxy SII, and before that, the SGS, with their 4.3" and 4.0" screens respectively, I was scared that the jump would be too much to handle, and the phone would slip and slide out of my hands, or simply tip out over the top. After a full day of wandering around with it, I can proudly report that the phone fell out of my hands 0 times, and actually feels more comfortable in the hand than the SGSII. This might be because I have big hands (ladies...), but is almost definitely more due to the fact that the phone is designed with these things in mind, and is both light and comfortable to hold. The rounded edges (much more similar in style to the SGS or  perhaps some of the older HTC offerings from that WinMo 6.5 era). The SGSIII is a joy to hold, and all doubts about the larger size are assuaged once you hold it. The camera doesn't jut out nearly as much as it did on the SGSII, or say the Nokia N8, but to say that it's flush with the back-plate would be lying. 

The power and volume keys are conveniently located in the same places as the phone's predecessors, and jut out just enough from the body to be reachable without making the phone seem clunky. 

Again, it's like holding one of those really smooth pebbles (hence the creative name for the colour Pebble Blue), except the pebbles don't have a 1.4GHz quad-core processor able to out-perform just about every hand-held device currently commercially available.

Feel (software)

That performance really shows. Everything zips off the bat. Full disclosure; the Optus bloatwaresoftware definitely hinders me from describing it as 'flawless'. And TouchWiz is always going to be a problem. However, it is still incredibly smooth and polished, and apps, widgets, screens, websites and galleries load seamlessly, and the multi-tasking is as good as I've ever seen on a smart phone.

The phone is going to be super-comfortable for everyone who's used any one of Samsung's recent offerings with TouchWiz. There are some features of the Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) Operating System that I have a bone to pick with, but they're not really SGSIII features. The main ones among them are the fact that getting widgets on the home screen isn't as easy as it used to be, and brightness control by holding down the notification bar appears to have disappeared...

For users new to TouchWiz/Android in general, the phone is perhaps the best one on the market to ease you in. The lack of lag and uber-responsiveness means that the complexities of the learning curve are smoothed out. It can be daunting to pick up something completely new and try it, but I assure you, the possibilities for customisation are near endless, and many features make your life easier than other phones might.

My current personal favourite feature/gimmick is the fact that swiping your palm's edge across the screen takes a screenshot. I kid you not, I took more than 50 screenshots today because it made me feel like a magician.

I think on the major features front, the phone won't wow at first, because all of the features are minor enhancements that make your life that little bit easier. Like DirectCall, which calls the contact you're looking at the contact card for or texting when you lift the phone to your ear, saving you up to THREE SEPARATE BUTTON PRESSSES! Another one is SmartStay, which detects when you're not paying attention to what's on screen, and dims the screen to preserve battery. Fancy, but not brilliant until it's perfect.

In all, the SGSIII's performance is a breeze, and is very much an improvement on its predecessor (which on its own was a brilliant performer).

Look (screen)

The screen is majestic. It is like staring into the eye of some Almighty Being. The SGS2's resolution and text looked instantly fuzzy by comparison. Every letter is sharper, every colour more vivid, and every pixel more alive. The blacks are deeper than the writings of Pablo Neruda crossed with Woodkid's lyrics, and the resolution is sharper than Valyrian steel. I can not stress enough how disgustingly beautiful the screen is. Some reviews claim it underperforms its rivals under direct sunlight. I say I live in Melbourne and what is that?

Summary

In all, this phone is awesome. Optus bloatware is currently the only thing stopping me from giving it 5 stars on performance, while a boatload of new features coupled with better battery life and a beautiful screen make it super awesome. The larger screen might be off-putting for some, but the highly ergonomic design and smooth feel make you feel comfortable and at ease with the phone in hand. People coming out of a 2 year commitment with the SGS1 should definitely seriously consider this phone, but so should anyone who wants a premium, reliable smartphone with just about every feature you could want and more. Questions, comments, queries? Shoot them through!

#7: I Killed My Turtle

Today is a day of absolute mourning and tragedy. So I wrote a poem.

RIP Yeezy

Can we get much higher?

A poem by Mashood Qureshi.

Can We Get Much Higher?

Yeezy, you would have been such a fighter,

Swimming from the bottom of the tank, to the top,

Yeezy, You were always such a high-flier.

But No One Man Should Have All That Power,

I wish I'd checked the ammonia levels every hour,

But now you're gone, and so's my 89 dollars,

When you see King Koopa, can you tell him I hollered?

All Of The UVB and Infrared Lights,

In contests with Hov' you always won the fight,

And haters at the pet-store, they Can't Tell Me Nothing,

In a weird kinda way, I guess this ya Homecoming.

And now you're gone, to Touch The Sky,

I'll Watch your Throne, try not to cry.

Now hurry along, don't stray much longer,

Because your passing will make me Stronger.

R.I.P. Yeezy the Turtle.

#6: I Am An Ass After 10PM

Offspring,


After getting home at about 1am after the night of August 24th, 2011, I StumbledUpon this comic (please read before reading the blog), and was so enraged, I simply had to write (and send) this e-mail to the author;


Dearest Author,

After drunkenly stumbling and scooting home and finding myself unable to fall asleep due to the lack of a response to an emotionally vulnerable text to a girl I like, I decided to Stumble for a while in the (now-)vain hope that she had merely decided on a post-midnight shower. After showing me all the cool ways of hacking vending machines and animated .gifs of adorable kittens jumping into glass windows the internet had to offer, StumbleUpon brought me to your comic entitled "If The News Was A Media Person".

Now, I'm not saying that my judgement is highly representative of a population that critically and after thorough analysis demands more from those who fuel its consumptive lust. I could never make that claim after 7 pints of micro-brewed beer and a drink called 'Esc' that looks like Red Bull, but claims to have the opposite effect (and I can't say it's worked). No. I write to you as a man who recently turned 20, and realises when he feels he has been robbed of his time by a comic strip.

You are a proponent of a medium. That medium is comic strips. Over the ages, the medium has evolved and seen many iterations. From the Garfield and Archie comics that surpass my grandparents for a place in our collective minds made time immemorial, to the likes of xkcd for the high-mono-browed geeks among us, through the drivel that is 'Three Word Phrase', arriving at the sporadically-updated, but ever-genius Perry Bible Fellowship Comics, those panelled works of humorous, insightful, poignant and witty art have served to console, humour, entertain and inspire us for decades. I have a folder on my Chrome bookmarks bar called 'Comics', where I store links to the 'most recent' page of every comic I like at the time, and click on on a daily basis to both crash my Intel Core i3 laptop temporarily, and to exercise my funny bone. And among my 6 or 7 rotational comics, not all of them disappoint, nor do all of them appoint. On some days, Cyanide & Happiness will elicit a 'share to Facebook' response from me, while xkcd will send me to xkcdexplained.com. On other days, Married to the Sea will have me in stitches in one panel while its bastard brother Toothpaste for Dinner will leave me wondering why I didn't just swallow detergent when I had the chance as a 2-year-old. Alas, I am sorry to say that neither "Subnormality!" nor any other of the comics hosted on Viruscomix.com will ever make my Comics list. Before I delve into the reasons why, I feel that I owe you an explanation as to why I even bothered to write this, rather than to Stumble on drunkenly, and forget the experience altogether.

I learnt something tonight. About 3 pints in, I learnt that talking to the hot blonde German girls and asking the most single and least inhibited one if she'd like a drink meant that I was infinitely more likely to get her number than I was had I decided to sit across the bar and stare at her pervertedly all through the night. Though it didn't work out, I felt as if I had achieved something. I had shown her that I had an opinion of her, and she could choose to act on it - or not - if she pleased. She politely declined my offer, and we both went happily on with our lives, likely never to meet again. It is with this spirit that I type out this already-wordy e-mail. I'm not here to tell you how you can make your comic better, I'm here to tell you why you have permanently lost 1 potential reader. Should you choose to act on it is your prerogative.

To begin, I feel that your comics are far too long-winded for the awkward and ultimately un-funny punchlines you choose to decorate them with. Before you ejaculate steam from your ears and turn the colour of beet-root flesh claiming 'Viruscomix are "Comix with too many words..." you fucking drunk moron!', understand that I see what you're trying to do, and I respect that some things can not be expressed in three panels the same way they can be expressed in just under thirty (in the case of the "Media Person" comic). Having said that, I don't believe there is a single idea in the world that requires 29 panels filled with over (an estimated) 600 words to articulate, unless the articulator is a pretentious, self-important and conceited so-faux-sticate, or perhaps the idea is either "The Middle-East Peace Plan" or "How to Get Attractive Women to Text You Back at 1am". Seeing that instead, you have opted to cover the issue of the over-saturation of our minds with irrelevant information by the mass-media (part of an interesting concept summarised from Huxley's "Brave New World" and contrasted with Orwell's "1984" in this comic of 19 less-texted, less-detailed - yet genius - panels), I can only deduce that you are an egregious self-aggrandising (pardon the Australian/British) comic artist who chooses to express their grievances with the world around them through what is frankly unnecessary and unimaginative artistic detail and a sub-par wit. Oh, and "too many words", of course.

The reason the "too many words" persists as a major problem of mine is two-fold. Firstly, your artwork is, as mentioned, unimaginative and bland. Visually, I have seen nothing more than the physical setting for an hypothetical conversation with an hypothetical figure, a la a particularly surreal scene in House S02E24, with House eating a sandwich on the bonnet of a car with his staff while in his hospital gown... down-town. You could just as easily vent your frustrations in blog form (see "It's Alf! In POG form!" for full comic effect), and perhaps elicit less disappointed responses to your comic(s). Further on this point; your minutiae only serve to distract the somewhat more intellectual crowd you aim to attract to your comic. The joke about the Avogadro Sandwich could have been about 12 times better, and 16 times less distracting. Instead, you upstaged yourself by making a joke that ultimately wasn't funny except for the part where you made fun of how 'Avocado' kind of sounds like 'Avogadro'. 14-year-old Mashood made that joke. Nobody likes that joke. But instead of paying attention to the flogged dead horse of a point that the news media bombards us with sensationalist headlines, I found myself reaching for the nearest razor and questioning my co-ordination to make a clean incision to end my life in the shortest possible time.  

Secondly, get better punchlines. If I've spent 5 minutes deciphering both an unclear delineation of chronology (though I can accept that that seems deliberate to demonstrate the obfuscation of the precision and deliberation with which the news media delivers current affairs) and ultimately-random scribblings on the wall behind the subject of the comic, I want a good punch-line. I don't want to be left feeling awkward for the news media man who is actually just a horn-dog preying on women he sees. This was not the point of your comic, and portraying News Media Man in this light right at the end, while casting the protagonist as a temperamental bitch who got fed up with him and suddenly decided to convey the view of the author that they will be abandoning current affairs programming and their live Fox News feed on their iPhone for an indefinite period of time shows that even you did not know how you wanted to actually end the comic.

Here is my summation of your comic in three panels on a verbal story-board;

IF THE NEWS WAS A MEDIA PERSON

- Summarised by Mashood Qureshi

Probably just under enough words since 2011

[Protagonist (P) stepping out of her house, greeted by News Media Man (NMM)]

1. (P): hey! How'd that by-election go yesterday?

(NMM): The way you anticipated, based on my forecasts, of course ;) Did you heard about the family that was stoned in Iran for allowing their daughter to go to college?

P: No?! What happened?

NMM: I'll tell you about it over lunch.

[P and NMM meeting over lunch, conversation continuing]

NMM: ...and basically, Iran is where we should go next, to liberate the people.

P: I question how you came to that conclusion.

NMM: You're entitled to- OH! Don't eat that profiterole! You'll get fat.

P: I maintain a healthy and balanced exercise regime and diet. Your so-called expert opinion is not tailored to match my life-style.

[P and NMM are now in a park, P looking rather frustrated, NMM defeated]

P: Come to think of it, you've seldom given me information relevant to my life-style. All you've ever done is fed me a life-style to emulate - but always fall short of - the lives of starlets and harlots, and I think it's about time I stopped talking to you!

NMM: Perhaps it's time for you to hear a more expert opinion on this issue?

P: Perhaps it's time for me to go and educate myself on the issues that actually concern me.

END

It's probably not the best thing in the world. But I don't see how I've not covered - in 3 supposed panels - any idea you took 29 to convey.

I am beginning to feel the effects of that 'Esc' drink (or maybe it's that old 2:43am-itis I've been hearing about), and coincidentally feel I have made my point in an ironically inflated period of time and number of words.

I implore you not to take my words as those of someone who knows what he's talking about, but rather to take them as feedback on your comic from a person who also read the John Lennon one, and didn't like it either.

Your artistic talent is quite reasonable, but it suffers under the weight of all of those words. If you want more regular readers who donate/share/tweet/post/+1 your comic, either get funnier, get more precise, or get actual punchlines. If you're smarter than I think I am, you'll do all three.

Kindly,

Mashood Qureshi

___________________________________________________________________

Is that what I should have done? Should I have lived and let live? Only time will tell. But you can tell me, too! Also be sure to show your friends! My goal in life is to never be able to introduce myself without someone asking me if I'm the ass who wrote a scathing e-mail to an innocent webcomic artist.

Perniciously,

Dad.

P.S. Yes, I do realise it's been over 7 months.

#5: I Enjoy the Taste of the Tears of My Enemies

Offspring,

I have come to realise, over time and through space, that this blog is quite depressing, wordy and also a bit of a bummer. Humour shines through in patches similar to bits of pumice that don't belong in the faeces-riddled kindergarten sand-pits (hopefully a thing of the past in your era), the premise is weak and seldom relevant, and ultimately, the content offers little to the reader and is quite evidently the rambling of a man-child with little to do.

Over time I will come to work out a way to get around this, but for now, here's another post.

Something I have trouble admitting to myself is that there are many ways in which I am like Malcolm, Frankie Muniz's character in Malcolm in the Middle. Good looks and bustling genius aside, there are certain things about this socially awkward, conceited character that ring true with my personality that I find both abhorrent and yet so familiar. The story revolves around the various neuroses of this gawky misfit. I was watching it on tv the other night, and in this particular episode of the show, Malcolm, fed up with the notion of 'prom', organises a 'morp', or anti-prom. 

"I am having more fun wearing this t-shirt that my mum bought me than a suit that I would get tear-stains on anyway" - or something to that effect...

But throughout the night of the morp, Malcolm decides that just being at this great meeting of social rejects finally coming together is not good enough. So he storms into the main hall, steals the mic, stops the music and announces, à la Holden Caulfield, that this prom - and all its friends - are merely phonies, and that while they exclude those rejects such as he, they are enjoying themselves and having the time of their miserable, lonely lives. Expecting shock and dismay on the faces of the dolled-up and dance-deficient, Malcolm wears a smug smirk that would give Kevin Rudd a run for his money for all of 4 seconds after asking "So how do you feel about yourselves now?" before the DJ fittingly plays the song "I Feel Good", by James Brown, and general pubescent Bacchanalia and virginal dancing resumes.

Though unsuccessful, it's evident that Malcolm wasn't content in achieving something meaningful. Rather, he felt that his achievement required the validation of a secondary purpose, and the acknowledgement of those whom he despised and envied the most - the popular, the normal. Basically, he wanted to see the Devil cry.

And I think that's a pretty normal behaviour. I think there's a degree to which we all want to win arguments for the purpose of making the other person lose, and acknowledge that they've lost. You can't just be right; the other person has to know you're right.

But I think I take it too far, sometimes. I've worked on it over the years, but I still find myself in situations and conversations where the other person backing down is not quite enough for me. And there's definitely a line after which it stops being necessary and starts being an exercise in wankery.

"Oh yes, [society], let me taste your tears. Your tears taste so good, ohhh [society], yes. Yeeeessssss. Yum yum yummmmmmm!" - Actually the best episode of South Park, ever.

It used to be over the smallest things; fights with mum as to whether or not I've done my homework, or whether or not someone misspoke when they said 'infer' instead of 'imply', or vice versa. In time it grew into a habit of douchey proportions, where the smallest argument had to .end.

So naturally this leaves you, my children, in a pretty dire situation. Remember when you were 4 and asked if you could have an ice-cream and I responded with "Well, can you?", and then I proceeded to explain to you why the distinction was important? That's what this is about.

So to everyone I've ever been abrasive towards in this way, I feel kind of bad about it.

Neurotically,

Dad.

#4: I Murdered My Father All Wrong

So before continuing, I should clarify; I haven't yet murdered my father. Also, this is not a piece on Oedipal self-discovery. Sophocles' Oedipus unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, and Freud's wrongly-named theory is a load of crock predicated on his own sick fantasies.

Offspring,

As you grow up (and if you are a boy), my role as a father is chiefly that of an educator. The father explains - and helps to make sense of - the world for his son, at least. This has been my experience to date, and after a very lengthy chat a friend of mine, I had my belief intensified in this concept.

I have often immersed myself in conversations pertaining to the seemingly aimless and nomadic nature of the adolescent male's life. With the help of a wonderful film called Garden State, I've gradually come to understand that there is a stage at which the adolescent male ceases to view his birth-home (that is to say, where his family is and where the centre of his universe and existence seems to be) as those things, and begins a life of temporary gratification and settlement. In my view, this period is one of intense tumult, but is a rite of passage of sorts for that boy to become a man. It is not a healthy lifestyle forever, but a necessary stepping stone for the boy to some day become a provider and a father. But what catalyses this step?

In my view, and in the aforementioned conversation, it all pertains to the concept of a 'father-figure'. This prevailing patriarchical mode of thought society can not be said to be unfounded, and I am of the belief that it is that way because we view the educating and explaining role of the father as crucial in our development as children. However, there comes a time where the biological father has to be 'cut loose', or 'murdered', for the adolescent male to move forward with his life. This does not mean that he ceases communication with his dad, and doesn't even necessarily mean that the father has to cease being the 'father-figure'. Rather, it means that there is a certain necessity for a boy to have a 'mentor' who doesn't treat him like a child, but rather with great respect and peership. Ironically, these mentors will often be much older, but earning their respect and forming that bond with them appears to be a crucial challenge for any male to conquer. 

So how do I fit in on this schematic? Firstly, I think I have been fortunate and blessed to have a dad I can have as a mentor. As mentioned above, he treats me with respect and grants me an autonomy over my actions that my father never could. And though this was naturally a gradual process, I feel that I am at the stage where I feel a certain conditional-love-based bond that transcends the traditional notion of 'family'. I have been quite lucky to have so conveniently found that mentor figure in my life so soon into adolescence and young adulthood.

But in that convenience lies another dilemma, and this is why I write to you, offspring. In much the same way as a man can not really love any woman that throws herself at him, or a spider will not eat dead insects, I feel that the lack of a challenge in acquiring a mentor will have a detrimental effect on me over the next few years. In the last year I have gone about trying to find other mentors in my life, and have had a few successes, with one particularly beneficial prospect. 

But the manner in which my 'dad' almost handed me the instrument of his demise is detrimental to me in two key ways. Firstly, his complicity in the act was, in hindsight, somewhat immasculating, and caused me to question my own ability and capacity to progress through life of my own accord. How much does he really respect me if he doesn't think I could do it myself? But secondly, and perhaps more seriously, is the fact that his complicity and my coincidental hesitation to make the clean cut means that there is a vestigial bond of kinship, cheapening the essence of this new, more powerful relationship. As it is unreal and unbelievable that an actor might speak to a specific member of the audience in a conventional performance of Hamlet, this relationship is exposed to me as an illusion when my mentor fills the role of the father when he buys me things, or lends me money, or provides for me unconditionally. Inherently, my inability to divorce my father from my mentor in my own mind, as well as my lack of another mentor to turn to as yet cause damage to my development into a man that provides and cares for a family. 

Now of course I have years to go, and I can not know what tangible effects this failed murder attempt have on Mashood-in-10-years, but I write this because it seems pertinent to much of my existential considerations these days, and I would be amiss to forget them when explaining to my children why they're wearing leather pyjamas to sleep-over parties.

What do you think? Do you think metaphorical patricide is a necessary step in every boy's life? Are you a girl that feels differently altogether about her father? I would love to know what the dynamic is for a girl and her parents, and how that contributes to her development as the matriarch of her family.

Homicidally,

Dad

#3: I am a pirate (and so can you be!)

Offspring,

First and foremost;

You are a pirate

Now that that is out of the way, I have a confession to make. Much in the same way that Kanye West confesses to being self-confident, I am confessing to being a pirate. Specifically, I pirate and hoard 'intellectual copyright' material. Through the use of Peer2Peer networks, I am able to acquire digital copies of CDs, DVDs, documents and other encodable material that friends of mine in the U.S. and in dingy corners of the Siberian expanse have paid [some] money for. 

Internet Piracy is wrong. Internet Piracy is the same as stealing a car that you see and like. Internet Piracy is the same as stealing a handbag. Internet Piracy is the same as stealing a DVD off the shelf. Except it's not.

There are arguments to both sides of this argument. The RIAA (read: "Fun Police") tells us that it is blatant theft of 'intellectual property'. 'Pirates' tell us that it is the right of the consuming masses to determine whether or not to patronise artists by attending concerts and purchasing physical merchandise, and that access to digital copies of their material in fact heightens the exposure of these artists, rather than denting their bank-accounts as Lars Ulrich would have you believe. Naturally I stand with the latter, but acknowledge that the former is a stance believed by some people out there, I guess, because otherwise we wouldn't be having this argument.

So kids, if you're reading this, and we've just had an argument about why you're wrong and I'm right, and I tell you some arbitrary-as reasons, consider this fodder for calling me a 'hypocrite'. In the meantime, I'm listening to music I didn't pay for, and you don't yet exist. Suck it.

Now we come to the fun part. Recently, Limewire was shut down, leading to the suicide of many music-lovers' bank accounts. In these darkest of times, many turned to alternate avenues such as other networks (Kazaa (does that even exist any more?), WinMX, eMule, etc.), others frequented Russian mafia websites offering free downloads upon receipt of an initial deposit of one of the user's fresh kidneys. Most painfully, however, many turned to paying for and downloading music from paid sources such as iTunes. Former rebels for the cause of free media, creative commons and getting something for nothing suddenly gave up the ideal because they couldn't download the newest (NSFW) Bieber (I warned you) track any other way. Thankfully, a few (read: many) bright minds (read: not-duds) knew about torrents, and tried to disseminate the information as best they could. To all of those saints, I take off my hat, and now throw it into the ring. For my friends, who over the past few days have asked me how to download music using torrents, I present this guide.

Before we begin, I advise that you be aware of your monthly download limit and know how to check it. Torrents allow you to download whole movies and albums at a time, and these can chew into your allowance, and there is nothing worse than being capped for 12 days.

Step 1: Acquire a program that works with torrent files

I personally use Vuze by Azureus. I've used it for over five years, and it has never let me down. Other options include uTorrent, BitTorrent, and many many more. Those are the most commonly used, and I wouldn't suggest deviating from that list if you are reading this post as a newbie. Download and install your preferred software, and proceed to Step 2, having collected the $200 from passing 'GO' (read: not having to buy 7-10 CD's over the next financial year). There are a whole bunch of advanced things you can do to tweak the software, but you really don't need to worry about them, unless you want an excuse to bother me.

Step 2: Download .torrent files

The program you downloaded in Step 1 (let's say it was Vuze, because Vuze is brilliant) deals with '.torrent' files. Consider these files to be little doorways to parties. At each of these parties, people have something, and you want it. You go into these parties, hang out, chat with these people, and eventually you have what they have, such as the latest Kanye album. In my opinion, for 99% of mainstream music and movies that've ever been published or recorded, the best place to go to is the appropriately named Pirate Bay. Now from here, it's quite easy:

- Search for what you're looking for. Let's run a trial search for 'Ke$ha', because we all want to download her album 'Cannibal' (actually being done as I type).

- Having run the search, there will be all kinds of results, ranging from single songs to full albums, also interviews or music videos will sometimes appear. If you want to refine your search by adding more terms, do this now.

- Searching for 'Ke$ha Cannibal' will get you better results than 'Ke$ha'. So now you have (at time of writing) 7 choices from which to pick. Which one do you pick? The one with the most 'seeds'. That is, the 'party' with the most people to share that thing you really want.

- So click on the 'SE' , or 'S' or 'Seeds' to sort the list by that value, and click on the link to the top-rated one. - The one with the most seeds will often be the most reliable one, too.

- Feel free to browse around the information for the more technical details, and to browse through the comments.

- But when you're satisfied the track-list is correct and the files are to your liking in terms of size, click the green 'Download This Torrent' link.

- Your browser will ask you 'save' or 'open with' (variation dependant on browser).

- Open with 'Vuze' (or preferred Torrent software).

- Soon, that software will open up with a pop-up window asking you where you'd like to save the file, and it will show you what it's going to download.

- Click 'OK' to confirm where you're putting it.

- Having clicked 'OK', you are on your way to downloading your first album (and what an album, I'm actually listening to it now, having downloaded it 3 minutes ago)! Congratulations!

Step 3: Enjoy your free music!

You now have a digital copy of whatever album, movie or TV show you wanted. Open it up with iTunes, VLC media player, or whatever else you use to run your digital media. Enjoy!

So hopefully that was helpful. If it wasn't, let me know! Did it work for you? Leave me a comment to let me know what your first download was. Did Ke$ha really pop your torrent-cherry? Or did you let Bieber touch you in your cyberspace first? Having trouble? Leave a comment, and even if I don't love you enough to respond to it, someone else might help you out!

So enjoy responsibly, kids, because the dangers of irresponsible music piracy are... well... I can't think of them right now, but I'm sure they're catastrophic, or the RIAA wouldn't spend as much money as they have trying to track down those that disagree with their policies.

And to my kids, don't be a pirate. But if you are, do what you want, because a pirate is free!

Nautically,

Dad.

#2: Religion is not Sacred

Offspring,

So religion, huh? It's formed the basis of so many decisions to date. Belief in the nature of the afterlife drove men to build pyramids and to redecorate Baghdadi marketplaces. On an extrapolated, general-society level, religion seems to cause more harm than good, because where mutually exclusive or arguably incorrect centrally-held core beliefs co-exist, there will be conflict.

But surely on the individual level religion provides the most hard-and-fast dieting regime, exercise routine, organisational skills-building program there is. Throw into that some semblance of a moral compass that on paper always points to 'N' for 'Nice', and you have the basis for wanting to indoctrinate all the world's children with your messages of peace and love. Coupled with the reward-punishment system that spruiks the 'Be Nice or Go To Hell' slogan, it's a value set that'll whip any fat, unfit, lazy and immoral person into a constructive member of a God-fearing society.

So one would argue having some basis by which to test one's moral standards is necessary, and it's at this juncture that I admit that I'm not a big fan of religion. On a global level, it does cause all those problems that are out there. Not intrinsically, but rather, through its application by those who seek to manipulate, religion provides a pious and self-righteous platform for the wicked to rule the Hell-fearing masses. For that reason, I have severe objections to imparting many teachings of any of the faiths on to just about anyone. For the sake of discussion, it's a great concept. But I'm not a huge fan of the tiny details of it all; how to cut the meat, what day to go to [house of worship] to optimise Heaven-points, whether or not to take the name of the Lord in vain. 

So I maed a comic, ENJOY!
 

Charredly,
Dad