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Monday, July 18, 2005

The Verdict...

Well I thoroughly enjoyed Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I cried my eyes out most of the way through the last chapter, and the rest of the book saw me laugh and smile, and bite my thumbnails down to the quick. I'm glad I bought it, glad that I queued for 10 minutes to get it, and now I'm getting ready to re-read it.

I highly recommend this book - if you thought books 4 and 5 were dark, let me assure you they are nothing compared to book 6. I'm glad no one actually got around to asking me any questions because I would refuse to answer them having read it - you absolutely all must read it yourself. I would have jumped on here raving about it yesterday, but to be honest I was too depressed at having finished it already, I just couldn't bring myself to write.

Anyway, my hat comes off for Ms Rowling, she has written yet another masterpiece, and I am heartily looking forward to another one!!!!


(excuse this entry for not being as eloquent as others, but writing about this book makes me lose focus of sentence structure and vocabulary hehe).

Also, I experienced DDDR on Saturday night... "I've heard of DDR, but what's DDDR?" you ask? Let me tell you: Drunken Dance Dance Revolution :-) We had some friends over to partake in some social alcoholic consumption on Saturday night (thus forcing me to take a break from HBP), and the first glass knocked me on the proverbial. Well that paved the way for another glass, and another until it appeared that somewhere I consumed nearly a whole bottle... Anyway, I foolishly decided that some DDR was in order, so I broke out the mats and challenged a friend. She'd never played, so it wasn't much of a challenge, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that I didn't lose my co-ordination with the alcohol (until people started selecting songs with green feet that ran off the meter - aaarggghh!!!). At any rate, fun was had by all, and I woke up the next morning, with no hangover, ready to complete my weekend's reading.

Ok, now for my final rant for today: Censorship - and today, I am on the side of the censors. The following excerpts are from Reuters:

Sen. Hillary Clinton pressed Thursday for a Government investigation into how sinulated sex cropped up in a modified version of the blockbuster criminal advvernture video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas."

"We should all be deeply disturbed that a game which now permits the simulation of lewd sexual acts in an interactive format with highly realistic graphics has fallen into the hands of young people across the country," Clinton wrote in a letter to the head of the Federal Trade Commission.

Saying the problem of explicit video games was "spiralling out of control," Clinton also said she was introducing legislation that would crack down on the sale of ciolent and sex-laden games to minors.

Now, I'm going to be honest here, and say that I agree that this game should not be sold to minors. I play it regularly (or I should say my bf plays it and I watch), and I love the game. It's got a dry sense of humour, it's full of action, and at the end of the day you don't commit crime for the heck of it, you do it because the crooked cops make you. Infact, any money you make along the way you are encouraged to put to good use, such as buying property, buying a business, and such. However, if you feel the urge, you can go on a killing spree for no reason, and this is something that our young impressionable kids do not need to interact in. I in NO way blame games for crimes that go on in the world, not at all. I believe it is the job of the parents and role models to teach our children that crime is not cool- but in this age of video games, could it hurt to put an age restriction on such games as GTA?
I also believe that it's times like these where our parents need to be most vigilant. With generation X becoming the parents of society (*gasp*), I'd like to think that parents no longer have an excuse not to monitor their children's internet usage, and I would also think that parents know how to do a regular cleanup of the home PC, and delete such offending mods as the "Hot Coffee" mod to GTA. If the home uses a chipped Xbox, I would also expect a parent to know how to delete games from the hard drive. Parents need to BE PARENTS, but I also think that if you need to show ID to buy porn, then you should have to show ID to buy games with senseless crime. 16 would be an appropriate age to cover the general public, in my opinion.

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