[Inspired by long political debates in online forums] Sometimes we want something, but to get it we have to endorse a group that does something bad. Like persecute a minority, one that you might even be part of. Say for example you want to vote Tory because it benefits you in some way, but you’re gay, and they have tendency to wish gays didn’t exist. Fear not! All you need to do is convince yourself you’re right, and that conscience will just have to shut up. There are tried and true methods for this, passed down through the ages to excuse all sorts of atrocities, and they are so simple anyone can use them! Even you! Step 1 – MINIMISE what it is that your conscience objects to. For hundreds of years people have justified doing bad things by minimising their assessment of its impact or meaning. You don’t even want to do something bad, you just want to ignore something bad someone else did, so it’s even easier! Just take the awful thing that was done (such as passing homophobic...

I've never really liked Rufus Wainwright much. I know he is one of the celebrity darlings of the gay community because he is so out, but I've always found him a bit of a twat. That opinion was only helped by his rather stupid opinion that gays don't need marriage , or at least he doesn't want one, so you can go marry your dog for all he cares. I'm always a bit flabbergasted when out celebrities claim they are against gay marriage, like Karl Lagerfeld . Do they really mean it, or are they only saying it for the attention, to be perceived as edgy and rebellious? Either way it stinks. You can be an anti-bourgeoisie, heteronormative capitalist system disrupting rebel gay if you want, but don't try to force you're way of being gay on others by removing their choices, or you're just as bad as the christian right. Now Rufus has changed his mind and decided that he does want to get married after all, so suddenly he thinks that the bans on it are unfair. How u...

Ah, what LOLZ. So glad that I follow @mariekehardy on Twitter, that's how I stumbled upon the conversation between her and @MyfWarhurst discussing the disturbing but enthralling Chatroulette. Basically it's a random webcam chat program - you login in are and randomly connected to someone else somewhere in the world, usually via webcam. If you get bored, just click next and go to the next person. It has already sprung up an amusing blog called ChatrouletteLOLZ . The speed with which an internet meme takes off is amazing. In this case I think it's due to the simplicity of the concept, although perhaps that is always the case. While it is still just an interesting gimmick at this stage, I'll be interested to see what uses people come up with for Chatroulette... it's never what you expect. I guess if nothing useful emerges from it, then it will likely die pretty quickly after the gimmick wears off. I wonder how long it will last....

1. She's hot, intelligent, quick witted and a hilarious bitch. 2. The way she treats Chuy. 3. Ketel One vodka. 4. The way she gives the comedians on her panel shit. 5. The way she gives the celebrities on her show shit. 6. My Horizontal Life. 7. Her silver fox. 8. She loves arcade games and has a Ms Pacman in her living room. 9. Kaslapis and pink tacos. 10. Gay Comedien: "OMG, can you imagine if you got to have lunch with Star Jones and Rosie O'Donnell, it would be amazing. They said you can ask them anything!" Chelsea: "What, like 'Why are you eating all my fries?'

This article in the LA Times is a great reminder of just how stupid Hollywood studios are. They are shocked to learn that DVD sales, one of their main sources of income is declining, and the more terrifying is that its the poor quality titles that are the ones with the steepest drop off in sales. You know despite the media blitz trying to flog crap, people seem to have better information from other sources about said crap and are refusing to buy it. "...alarming, especially for studios that have thrived on seducing moviegoers into seeing mediocre product, is the realization that audiences are becoming more quality conscious. In the past, if a forgettable action film hit pay dirt at the box office, it would perform correspondingly well in DVD, allowing studios in greenlight meetings to provide a conversion rate -- i.e. that if a movie of a certain genre made $100 million in the theaters, that would equal X millions of units in DVD. But judging from recent DVD sales figures, films ...

Newspapers are dying apparently. There is various analysis and commentary floating around on the webs to suggest so: Wall Street Journal about to go bankrupt, Chicago Tribune times, etc. The fear from this, to summarise from what I've read elsewhere, is that it will mean the death of quality in depth journalism. The traditional business model provided the resources, through classifieds, advertising, entertainment info, etc to fund the expensive but socially necessary investigative journalism. Of course, the content that supplied the income had little relationship to the important political, social and cultural content of papers, which was in a sense free. We've only tweaked to this since new technology has broken apart that model, striping out the revenue sources and providing them cheaper and better through other means (ie eBay, Craigslist, online personals, entertainment directories, etc). So who pays for the good journalism now? Only governments and corporations have the mon...

So I, err, 'obtained' a copy of S. Darko, and now aren't you glad that I did, because you don't have to wait your turn. I mistakenly presumed that Richard Kelly, written/director of the original Donnie Darko was involved somehow, I imagined that perhaps given the less then stellar performance of Southland Tales (neither a critical or box office success), that he had returned to the Darko universe for a little comfort. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, because I actually thought Southland Tales was good. Believing that when watching the film made for a strange experience above and beyond the self-consciously contrived actual strangeness of it. All of these 'Kelly-esque' were there, but it was like the film-maker didn't know how to put them together. Which would have been odd if Kelly actually had a hand in it, but he didn't. Not even some vague EP credit, nothing. He basically disavowed the thing that was created by the studio that owns...