C.O.D. Modern Warfare 3 Review

Having read reviews of MW3 and finding a few of them (and a lot of internet people) saying that it was shit because it’s no different than the others I decided I would check it out for myself and try to be objective about it (in so far as that’s possible for an opinionated gamer such as myself).

The first thing I have to say is, yes, it is no different from MW and MW2 and in a lot of ways no different from any other “AAA” FPS in the last 5 years. The story isn’t terribly immersive and the characters, while pithy, tend to spew over-used cliches. It works for the whole ‘action movie’ aspect of the Call of Duty series but it can be a bit grating at times. The other major thing I have to say is shame on Activision and Infinity Ward. The Gaming Liberty‘s review of MW3 says:

“The story is hardly inspiring, the characters are as transparent as ever and it’s just as throwaway as you think it is, but who cares?”

They then go on to give the game a score of 9/10. I’m sorry but the story and characters in a game are worth FAR more than a measly 10%. If the story and characters of a Legend of Zelda game or an Uncharted game or any other game worth spending hours and money on were worth that much then they would not be the great games they are. Story and characters are there to immerse you in the world, without that you are simply working some buttons and levers to achieve some random objective which may or may not be fun. Even cutesy, small-scale games like Patapon and Mad Blocker Alpha have the story and characters being far more than a measly 10% of the entire game as that pretty much IS the game.

In any event, in a return to my scolding of Activision and Infinity Ward, if everyone who plays your game says the story and characters (an undeniably integral piece of the whole) are flat and throwaway then you have not, I repeat have NOT made a great game. Perhaps a good game, but not a great game. And the difference is monumental. Imagine Grand Theft Auto IV without any of the characters and their interactions and none of the story, just randomly generated missions with very little text to inform you of the context of the mission. You just would not play that game. It would be broken and feel totally empty. You can’t tell me that that means that only 10% of the game is missing, it’s simply not true. Activision and Infinity Ward have made at least 3 games (focusing solely on the Modern Warfare series) that can be charged with flat characters and a throwaway story. Given that these games have been wildly successful and highly popular, almost defining the current landscape of online multiplayer (at least in the US where MMOs aren’t overwhelming the FPSs) it is at their feet that we can lay the blame for a lowering of the bar in terms of the quality demanded of everyone else for game design. The common complaint is “Well, who wants a lengthy single player campaign when no one cares about the story?” That would be pretty much no one. I (and many, many other people) would however like a lengthy single player campaign where I CAN care about the story. So, in conclusion, shame on Activision and Infinity Ward.

That being said, I must admit I actually enjoyed my time with Modern Warfare 3. I played approximately 2 hours of the campaign before a crash to desktop bug disrupted my gameplay. Given my familiarity with the other installments in the series I’m fairly confident that this is long enough to give a well-rounded review of the game as the first few missions give a well-rounded re-immersion into the world of Modern Warfare. I enjoy FPS games, I enjoy the challenge presented on PC with lining up shots well and I pride myself on being a pretty good marksman. In that regard, given that the combat aspects of MW3 haven’t noticeably changed since MW, I was always going to enjoy playing this game, and so I did. The combat is frenetic and fast-paced and enemies, while not the smartest bunch, present a thorough challenge even to an FPS veteran such as myself, being placed in well-placed spots to force you to change up your tack in a given firefight. The level design in the levels I’ve played through, while following the primarily linear path of most modern FPS games, afforded enough branching paths to allow me to attempt different strategies if one routinely provided me with hot, leaden death. The variety of toys to play with is also quite enjoyable, alongside the plethora of armaments provided throughout the levels. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but there’s always a distinct pleasure in swapping out a depleted weapon for a shotgun or the like and tearing enemies up until you find a nicer weapon to give added range and accuracy (can you tell I like sniping?)

So, from an FPS point of view, MW3 is a solid game and quite fun to play. From an action movie point of view, it’s also quite enjoyable. The story lends itself very easily and obviously to an action movie style, but the set pieces, such as attaching mines to the bottom of a sub to force it to surface in order to infiltrate it or trying to make your way through a falling plane and engaging enemies in a thoroughly Inception-inspired, gravity-twisting section, do add to the immersion in the action itself, if not exactly into the story. It’s a subtle difference, but it has a not so subtle impact on a player when they look back on their gameplay experience.

On the tech and graphics side, I didn’t ramp the specs all the way up on my PC as I wanted to get into the game fairly quickly, but my PC, which struggles playing Crysis 2 at anything above 1280×960 with no Antialiasing, utterly breezed through 1600×1024 with full Antialiasing (x4), Shadows and Specular Maps, so there is probably a lot of performance tweaks in the MW3 engine which, let’s face it, is really just a slightly updated MW2/Black Ops engine. As with all Call of Duty games since MW Antialiasing is a must-have option if you don’t want the game to look terribly cruddy and blocky.

So, I’ve stolen enough of your precious time for now, so I’ll get to the point most of you have been waiting for, the scoring. I’m going to give it 6.5/10. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable and fun game and it’s good. But it’s not a great game. Not by a long shot. A great game is one that has Moments(TM). Moments that will stay with you long after you’ve lost, traded or thrown away the game itself. Moments that occur to you months or years later and have you yearning to pick up the controller/keyboard/mouse and throw yourself back into the fray. Modern Warfare, and every other game in the series, is simply a good game. Worth playing, if you like that kind of thing, but certainly not a great, classic game. In 3 to 4 years when reviewers come along to recount the greatest games of the preceding 15 years, it’s unlikely Modern Warfare 3 will be anywhere near the top of that list. Fair play to Activision and Infinity Ward for making good games, but you guys should reaching for universal acclaim. You can have your lengthy, intense, emotional, lasting appeal single player campaign AND your wildly successful online multiplayer without sacrificing what you’ve already built up. Seriously, from someone who doesn’t just play FPS games to “pwn some n00bs”, put more effort into it. I work at an independent game studio and we don’t just want to make good games that pay the rent. We want to make great games. You guys might want to take a page out of our leaf, or something to that effect.

Peace,
dj357

World Atheist Convention: Day 2 (Super, Super Late Edition)

As I haven’t been blogging for months, I completely missed the fact that I never actually posted this piece. While it’s remarkably out of date (back in June for cripes’ sake!) it’s still got enough content in it that I can’t leave it sitting in my drafts. Enjoy!

[08/06/2011]
Unfortunately due to a lack of internet access and other things during the weekend I wasn’t able to keep hugely up to date with blog posts on the conference and I also missed the early sessions on Sunday morning, which is a shame as I missed the awesome Maryam Namazie who I hear was on form as ever, but I’m here to add my voice to the many others reporting from the event.

Why Do We Believe?

It’s been a long, long time since I blogged, so I think it’s time I got back into the swing of things. Let’s start with a deep question, why do we believe?

Why do we believe that a 2000 year old jew lives on in some sort supernatural plane of existence and interacts with us on a daily basis? Why do we believe that there will come a day in the near future when the entire world faces judgement at the hands of the Abrahamic God and only the worthy will be ‘saved’ while the rest will suffer eternally? Why do we believe that there is a life after death?

Often times it’s said that it comes down to where one is born and raised and the pre-existing beliefs of one’s friends and family that defines what we believe. While this certainly tends to shape the flavour of our beliefs, I think the belief itself pertains far more to an internal requirement than any external factors. A lot of people tend to proclaim “well, you have to believe in something, right? Otherwise, what is there to believe in?” This seems to speak to an internal requirement that there be something greater than ourselves to believe in. In my travels and discussions and internal ramblings it seems to me that this is far more indicative of having a belief in something supernatural than merely place of birth and upbringing.

This has only recently become a coherent thought in my head, and it needs time to develop so I may revisit this in the future but I felt it was necessary to get it out there and potentially get feedback from others on it. So, what are your thoughts?

Peace,
dj357

World Atheist Convention 2011: Day 1

Aloha and greetings from sunny Dublin! Unusually warm and sunny for Ireland despite the time of the year but rather nice to start off the weekend of the WAC 2011!

I’d like to just stick my oar in on a topic that came up and piqued my interest. It’s the issue of why do we have a gathering in the first place? Surely all we could talk about is our shared lack of belief. It conjures up a rather dolorous image of a group of people twiddling their thumbs and constantly asking each other if they believe in God yet. The simple answer is because we are the minority. The wonderful point was made that in a society where most everyone collected stamps and thought it was a moral requirement, there would be groups of aphilatelists popping up discussing how to live their lives well while not collecting stamps. The same is true of atheists. The long answer is that in a world that is primarily religious, a world where the common consensus is that religion of some form is a necessary foundation for a moral life, a world where people are assumed to be religious, a world where social and legal policies greatly reflect the religious beliefs of the people and their elected members of government it is vital the people who don’t collect stamps stand up and say “Hey, hang on a second. How dare you accuse us of being amoral when you impose a pre-existing, socially conceived moral framework onto your religion and then try to pass it off to us as having its origins in your delusion of choice.”

That is why we have conventions.

Some Favourites

I figure it’s time for another personal post so this one is just going to be a small group of my Top 5 Somethings.

This post will be my Top 5 Vocalists:
Randy Blythe – Lamb of God
Bjorn ‘Speed’ Strid – Soilwork
Rob Halford – Judas Priest
Mikael Åkerfeldt – Opeth
B. Dez Fafara – Devildriver

Bjorn Strid has to take the crown as his range is insane, from wailing heights to make any female gospel singer envious to the crisp, clean depths of utter death metal growling. And yet he never falls prey to the common traps of brutal death metal where everything is guttural and incomprehensible, his growls and screams are all pristine and quite often are paired with delicate and engaging melodies. If I could sing like anyone else it would have to be Bjorn Strid.

Randy Blythe is an extremely close second however as, while he can’t quite match Bjorn’s wide range, he more than makes up for that in fully developed sounds in his lower ranges. He can go from high, punchy throat-wrenching screams all the way down to deep and punishing growls that are drowning in rich bass tones. I’ll never quite reach the full range of Bjorn but I do a mean Randy and Lamb of God are one of my favourites bands to f**k s**t up to!

Rob Halford needs no real description as one of the founding members of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal that brought us genre-defining greats such as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden which still to this day influence many, many metal bands. While Bjorn has an awesome range, Rob Halford owns hands down in that regard bringing high-pitched to all new heights while maintaining a powerful low-end that brings great flavour to Judas Priest’s palette of sounds. He’s also helped define the metal look of leather and motorbikes and doing all that while being super camp is something you truly have to respect. Something that all youngsters unsure of themselves can look to for support.

B. Dez Fafara is just plain awesome, every song he sings sounds so brutal that you can nearly imagine blood pouring from his tattered throat but he pulls it all off with such skill and colour that I personally listen to so-called “black metal” and come away shaking my head in confusion.

Last, but far from least we have the inimitable Mikael Åkerfeldt who like Bjorn, another Swede, manages to have an astounding range and depth to his voice that gives his clean vocals a passion and emotion that is not always as easy to find as one would imagine and yet his death metal vocals are truly deserving of their name. Treading a finer line between B. Dez and Randy Blythe at their most brutal, Mikael manages to give a classic death metal sound a refreshing upgrade.

So, that’s my Top 5 Vocalists. I know my choice is really limited to the world of metal but given my wide range of musical taste, I personally find that metal vocalists, when they know what they’re doing are truly some of the best vocalists in any genre. The level of skill needed to pull off the sounds that Bjorn, Rob and co. do is really high and it lends itself automatically to any other genre. This is why you end up with bands like Within Temptation, Nightwish and Epica who have highly trained vocalists, even if metal wasn’t where their training was focused.

Peace,
dj357

Communication in the 21st Century

This is yet another post that his been lingering in my drafts during my absence from the blogosphere but still quite relevant, just not recent as mentioned in the post

[15/05/2011]
Having recently read an article in Red magazine about the sea change of modes of communication over the last 20 years since the advent of email, SMS and tweets i feel the need to make my voice heard.

The article, written by Liz Fraser in Red magazine May 2011 edition, tells us:

Of course, ‘Yours sincerely’ would sound far too stuffy and heavy-handed these days, but ‘xxx ;-)’? When did that become okay when asking your boss to approve budgets?

Well, first of all, unless you work in a very informal setting with few total employees, it still isn’t okay. Her initial premise is flawed, however, as ‘Yours sincerely’ or my preferred ‘Kind regards’ is far from “too stuffy” in a business setting. Even if you are bosom buddies with your boss, you really should be keeping informal speech to informal settings.

Worse than this, which it could be argued is a minor point and highly subject to context and interpretation, she then goes on to point out that communication is 20% the words you say and 80% how you say them, making face to face communication the most effective method of communication. This important 80% is missing from most electronic interactions, she rightly points out, however she claims that to make up for this it is totally acceptable and reasonable that we use emoticons or smileys to add the tone and emotion that is missing from these interactions.

While this may be correct in the informal world where text messages become minefields of potential misunderstandings without smileys to help differentiate between serious and sarcastic, playful and pissed off, this is most certainly not the case in business. If hundreds of years of multilingual literature can evoke crystal clear imagery and unambiguous descriptions and definitions solely through the use of well constructed syntax why then should we say that we have magically come to a point now, in the 21st century, where words are not powerful enough to be unequivocal in their meaning?

Peace,
dj357

A male perspective on women, clothing and feminism

(a little disclaimer: apologies to transgender and intersex folk, I am not ignoring you, this article is just aimed directly at the social conventions around the prototypical gender roles. It’s regressive and it sucks but that’s life it would seem.)

Spurred on by an internal discussion with myself on the topic of the French ban on burkas etc… I’d like to offer my own perspective on how women, and their clothes, are perceived in society. It’s admittedly a male opinion, but a largely unusual one given the standard of stereotypical male thinking.

On the subject of burkas first of all I must admit I’m a little torn. I rail against the idea of enforced dress codes and uniforms etc… and I’m of the opinion that people should be allowed wear what they want when they want. At the same time, however, I’m vehemently opposed to the further oppression of women at the hands of vicious patriarchies in the form of forcing them to hide their bodies in cloth sacks in order not to inflame the lust of men (alongside clearly hypocritical claims that men are perfect and women are the weak gender).

A Crysis on the Homefront

Aloha! Given my recent discussion of FPS games and the highlight of one of my referenced articles being Homefront, I figured I’d give a bit of an update now that I’ve finished playing it and also pair it with my initial impressions of Crysis 2.

The End of Desktop Computing…?

This article from Gizmodo (yes you may be noticing my trend of liking gawker sites) discusses the rise of Touch Computing, in the dominant form of the iPad, and it’s effects upon the heretofore dominance of Desktop Computing from the point of view of heavy content creation.

Lots of lucky people around the world understand the joy and the freedom afforded by tablets like the iPad when surfing the web, watching movies and flicking through photo albums but, equally, a large number of people are bridging the gap between Content Creation on a Desktop to doing the same on a touch-screen tablet. So, is the iPad the beginning of the end of Desktop Computing?

Video Games, Books and Art

Having recently read many articles on the web, particularly on Kotaku, around the ideas of video games as art and how long single player first-person shooters should be I feel compelled to weigh in, in my own space as opposed to waging comment wars with other people on various different sites and forums.

This article speaks about the thorny issue of the length of single-player first person shooters, and the comments highlight some of the diverse opinions on the matter. While I know that, like many of these art-based discussions, ultimately most of this stuff boils down to subjective preference, I think it’s important to look at these topics, insofar as is possible, from objective standpoints.

Before we move ahead, I highly recommend you also check out this article tackling the “video games as art” discussion which touches on a lot of topics I’ll be bringing in also.

Beliefs vs. Fact

This has long been a debate of various sorts and forms in the non-believing community but I think I’ve finally figured out how I want to phrase my argument in relation to it.

We have these things called beliefs, that quite often are not based on evidence, yet are still robust, rational and logical. For example “I believe that peanut butter and jam make a good sandwich filling” is a rational belief as I’m basing it upon my own experience and the experience of others. The problem with beliefs though is that they can quite often be wrong and can also disagree with both established consensus and even reality itself. For example “I believe that I can see Angels who guide me through life and watch over me.” On the one hand, a lot of people don’t share this belief, and on the other there’s no actual evidence for it outside of one person’s subjective experience.

We also have things called facts. These puppies are a hell of a lot more useful. For example “so long as the Earth maintains it orbit around the sun, the sun will always rise the next day” this is an established fact. We can link the rising of the sun to the structure of our solar system and based upon that establish logically and rationally that the above example is indeed a fact. The important thing to note here is the details may differ or change with new scientific understandings or discoveries, for example it could potentially happen that the times we now attribute to sunrise and sunset across the globe could migrate slowly forcing us to alter our current timezone system (it’s not likely, but certainly not impossible) but still the rising of the sun would remain a fact. So too can we say that while the individual mechanics underlying the Theory of Evolution* may change, or more rather our understanding of those underlying mechanics, the theory as a whole is an undeniable fact.

That word “undeniable” is a key one though. With beliefs one simply believes or disbelieves. With facts, however one can accept it or deny it. While accepting it requires no active belief (we don’t believe in gravity, we accept it as a fact of nature) denying facts requires some active belief. To deny a fact such as gravity, one needs to actively believe either that people are wrong and it is not a fact or believe that universe does not in fact function the way the so-called fact would imply.

This important distinction between disbelief and denial is rather profound and it’s effect can be seen in modern parlance. People who doubt that Hitler and his Nazi government put millions of Jews to death during WWII are not called Holocaust-disbelievers. The Holocaust is not a belief to be debated upon such as Deism or Theism etc… it is an established fact of history. To doubt the Holocaust happened is to deny a fact of the world. As I mentioned above, some details may change over time, we may yet uncover secret documents that detail that someone other than we thought was actually signing the orders in Auschwitz for the murders (unlikely) but the overall fact will remain a fact.

With all this in mind I think it’s time we stop asking/responding to questions in the form of “Do you believe in [insert established scientific fact here]” and start demanding that the question become “Do you accept [insert established scientific fact here]“

I do not believe in a God or gods. I do not “deny” God or gods as they are not Fact. I do not “believe” in Evolution, I accept Evolution. These are important phrases and important kinds of phraseology that I think would serve not only the non-believing community well, but mankind in general also.

* – It’s NOT just a theory. It’s a Theory.

Intangible Evidence for Ghosts Pt. I

As the title suggests, if there does happen to be any robust evidence for the existence of ghosts or spirits or any other popular manifestations of the supernatural world, it’s intangible. We can’t see it and we certainly can’t find it. I was recently watching a Discovery series called Ghost Lab as part of my search for engaging entertainment and I was drawn in by their claims of “scientific” studies and a search for “evidence of the afterlife.” For the sake of transparency I must admit that I only watched the first episode in the first series and I have not watched any of the other episodes, including the latest series. That being said I found their so-called “scientific” methods highly flawed and their whole approach smacks of a distinct lack of impartiality.

These guys, the Klinge brothers, are coming into this whole situation with the assumption that there is such a thing as the afterlife and spirits and they contaminate all of the conclusions they draw with this bias. They are like the theist who is sure that God exists and that the Bible is true and takes any evidence she comes across and twists and manipulates it until it confirms her belief. This kind of thing is, for the uninformed, called “confirmation bias” and it simply means that you ignore anything that could disagree with your theory and you only look at that which seems to confirm it. It’s a common theme in pseudo-science and bad theology (now there’s a redundant phrase if ever I’ve heard one) and it is not a part of the scientific method.

The first episode is helpful, however, as it illuminates both the motivation behind the investigations and the methods used by the team which is, after all, the meat of the discussion: how do you (or can you even) prove that ghosts and/or spirits exist? Near the beginning of the episode one of the brothers retells the story that got him interested in the world of the paranormal. We are shown a piece of old footage, which one can only assume is the one in question, as he tells us about filming a visit to Gettysburg with his family when he was young and he was amazed to see a lone, small group of people dressed up in Civil War get-up strolling through a field whereby he asked his parents to pull over so he could get out and get closer to film them. He then tells us that he turned off the camera, made his way out of the car and got as close to the field as he could yet when he looked to find the group they had simply disappeared. He says, rather authoritatively, that there were not close enough to the forest line to have made it there by that time and, seemingly most importantly for him, there were no other groups or onlookers nearby which, he assumes, would indicate a re-enactment of some sort. Now, if the footage we saw is the footage shot then I have to question his claim that they could not have made it to the tree line in that time. The landscape seems to be very rolling and hilly and the group seen on screen with a giant waving flag does not appear to be too far away from the tree line in the shot that we see. I have to question both why he turned off the camera in the first place, and how long it took him between that point and getting to seeing that they had disappeared. If I was him in that situation, even at that age (I think he mentioned being around 9 or so at that point) I would hesitate to jump to a supernatural explanation for their disappearance.

This presupposition of supernatural events seems to have followed this man and his brother well into their adult lives and into their supposed scientific investigation of supernatural claims as we’ll see in the following examples I’d like to mention from that show. They investigate two specific locations that are supposedly haunted. One is a municipal auditorium which has connections to rock-a-billy and Elvis himself while the other is a plantation house which is connected with civil war era military men and abuse of slaves.

The Shreveport Municipal Auditorium is their first stop. They detail some of the stories from people who have experienced strange goings-on and they go over some of the potential explanations for the phenomena from the point of view of the paranormal world and then they proceed to investigate. I’m fairly impressed with most of their methods as they lay down a lot of monitoring equipment over a large area to try and capture as much information as possible using devices to detect changes in temperature, shifts in electromagnetic fields and sound recorders to pick up any so-called Electronic Voice Phenomena. These EVP are my first issue, although I must preface this with the fact that throughout their investigations, they focus most of their efforts upon the places that have been reported as being linked to paranormal events, which is not truly scientific. It would be far more scientific to simply gather all the available data they could over an extended period of time and then collate the it to examine it for any noticeable phenomena. Furthermore their equipment is never shown to be insusceptible to outside interference from other electronics or other forms of electromagnetic interference especially given that they conduct the Shreveport investigations in a large old building that contains large amounts of electrical wiring and equipment, which is apparently left connected and untouched during their, primarily, night-time investigations.

Anyway, back to EVP. This is the first issue I have with their methods as they focus their efforts on detecting EVP in one of the supposed paranormal event sites and they contaminate their results so thoroughly that it is quite simply required that we ignore any of the results they find. It is important to understand that the devices they use are handheld recorders with low-quality microphones and the hardware itself modulates the input volume based on the level of the input it receives so the quieter the surroundings become the higher the gain on the recordings, which further increases distortion of any captured input until the device regulates the level to a more manageable volume. Furthermore, since it’s a low quality microphone being used, as anyone who has recorded any kind of audio or video on a mobile phone knows, distortion is guaranteed when things get any way loud. So, they conduct their EVP test, which consists of asking an empty room a series of questions and waiting for a response, supposedly from an other-worldly entity. I highly recommend Derren Brown’s tv show Derren Brown Investigates The Ghost Hunter for a look at how sketchy these EVP, and, more importantly, their highly subjective and downright ludicrous interpretations, can be. Before the test was conducted, they were advised that one of the supernatural events in the building involved someone hearing someone, who apparently wasn’t there, saying “they saw the light”. Once the complete the testing and return to their operations truck to review the audio file they come across what sounds like some distant voice saying, you guessed it, “they saw the light”, now to my ears, and to anyone who has listened to the quality of the recording and the amount of noise and distortion going on, what they hear as a distant voice saying this phrase they had pre-attuned to, I hear it as simply the rustling and movement of lots of people and equipment in a big, echoing space, which is exactly what their testing environment was like. They then did something which initially I thought would redeem them from their mistakes in that they went back to the site where the so-called EVP was detected and they had one of their team utter the supposed phrase in a hushed manner and then brought back the recording to their truck to analyse and compare both audio samples of the supposed phrase. I initially applauded this as it showed true scientific methodology, if only for a brief moment: This is our hypothesis, let’s go conduct an experiment and see if our hypothesis conflicts with the real world or not. They failed spectacularly in that all they did was look at the general wave forms of both audio files and compare their general shape. The supposed EVP was lower in volume than their voice sample but its general shape seemed to correspond to the sample of the team member uttering the phrase. And that was it, they concluded that their EVP was indeed evidence of some sort of other-worldly presence uttering a phrase. That’s it. No further in-depth analysis, no confirmation that the waveform and frequencies actually conform to human speech and no accounting for the fact that most people have radically different voice patterns.

It’s extremely common where EVP are concerned to have someone in a room with a handheld recorder either in hand or resting somewhere asking questions of the empty room and on the recording you hear, when the questioner falls silent, the background noise increases in volume audibly and becomes extremely dominant as the gain on the recording device rises to detect any and all bits of input. Anyone familiar with any kind of audio knows that the higher the gain goes the more distorted and noisy the signal becomes to the point where the signal to noise ratio is just untenable and nothing meaningful can be taken from the signal. What paranormal researchers then do is listen to these sections of pure noises and try to discern human voices or sounds from them. In case of so-called ‘demonologists’ they don’t even limit themselves to discernibly human voices but anything that sound remotely like any kind of words or phrases. Quite often the questions will come in the form of Yes/No questions, seemingly in order to make the communication as easily as possible for these spirits. Given that these spirits are said to be able to inhabit people and control them, suck the temperature from a room in order to manifest physically and have also been charged with physically interacting with objects and/or people and flinging them across the room, or making them levitate, it seems highly suspect to assume that these entities could not string convincing sentences of audible and comprehensible words together. No, instead we are left with clips and phrases as vague and subjectively interpreted as is possible to imagine. If one were to attempt to prove the existence of other-worldly entities through EVP it would require far more sensitive equipment and far more well controlled circumstances where someone simply shifting their stance would not lead to the recording equipment picking up the rustling of their trousers and mangling it through high-gain distortion into something vague and noisy that an entirely impressionable and biased individual could then subjectively interpret as a muffled “Yes” in response to a vague question that he has intentionally formed in the hopes of receiving a Yes or No response (where no response at all would then further be interpreted as a lack of willingness to respond to the question at hand).

So, we’ve shown that not only is the entire concept of EVP and the common approach to it completely flawed and biased, but we’ve also shown specifically that the methods implemented by the team to both capture the necessary data and then interpret it were flawed, biased and, crucially, wholly unscientific. Should we give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were merely overcome by their enthusiasm? No, not in the slightest. They then go on to experience a series of so-called paranormal events, none of which are captured on camera, and none of which are repeatable or objectively confirmed. All confirmation of the events came from subjective viewers in a highly biased and impressionable state. One of the specific examples was of a door that is purported to open and close itself, which apparently happened during their night of testing but did they decide to set up some cameras on the door in question and observe it? No. They seemed distinctly determined to do everything they could to make every opportunity for highly subjective and non repeatable events to occur.

They then went on to what I find is one of the more ridiculous techniques I’ve come across in paranormal investigations and it seems wholly informed by the presupposition that spirits of dead humans exist and inhabit certain locations for interminable amounts of time. They call the technique “Era Cues” whereby based upon the dominant ghost story in the location (in Shreveport the dominant story was that the rockabilly culture and maybe even Elvis himself was inhabiting the building, seemingly reminiscing and unable to let go of a “golden era” of music and culture) they then do everything they can to introduce cues to that specific era in time, hence “Era Cues”, it’s a somewhat elegant idea and even more so when you buy into their presuppositions but it is once again entirely devoid of any substantial evidence whatsoever. First of all it presupposes the existences of human spirits. Then it further presupposes, solely on the back of the first flawed premise, that these spirits will hang around long after their death. We then build the house of cards one layer higher on the back of our flawed foundations to presuppose that somehow these spirits, who apparently “act out” at random, will be induced to “act out” more than usual by stimulus that is apparently linked to their supposed era.

In order to effect this higher incidence of “acting out” the team ask a rockabilly style band to come set up on stage and play some “era” music. The issue I pointed out earlier of loud people in a loud room trying to be quiet to hear quiet other-worldly noises is amplified (pun intended) by the team insisting that when the song finishes that everyone in the giant auditorium be quiet so that the team members, spread throughout the building can listen for any strange goings on. What do we find? Two jumpy and impressionable female team members (casting no stereotypes here, merely accurate descriptions of specific individuals) say that they heard a door close somewhere behind them that they swear, and video footage apparently confirms, was open earlier. Really? That’s it? That’s all we get from rockabilly spirits energised by music from their era? A closing door? Yes, apparently that’s the extent of the powers of human spirits, they make people’s rustling pants sound like voices and they encourage doors to close (off-camera). [Please bear in mind that my "rustling pants" hypothesis has far more evidence behind it than their weighty presuppositions, however, I still acknowledge the fact that it could also have been a shirt or some equipment etc...]

End of Part One. Part Two will deal with their visit to a plantation house with a ghost story apparently dating back to the American Civil War.

On The Merits of Being Honestly Intellectual

[This post has been awarded the official badge of mediocrity]

Many people (myself included) will extol the virtues of being intellectually honest, however today I’d like to speak to the merits of being honestly intellectual i.e. being exactly as smart, intelligent and intellectual as you are at (almost) all times.

It’s a common experience both in the real world and in the virtual world of television and film media that there are certain people, generally at least one, in any given circle of friends who are if not actually more intelligent or intellectual than the others they certainly come across that way. Personally, in most of my various circles, that person tends to be me. I’m pedantic (I correct people all the time on spelling, grammar, logic etc…) and I like to use a wide-ranging swathe of my vocabulary most of the time. It speaks to this fact that the level of grammar and vocabulary that I use in this blog (which is generally similar to that which I tend towards in my verbal orations) ranks as “100% Intermediate” in Google’s search based on Reading Level, which would rate it at around a University level of reading but not quite the standard of a Scientific Journal or other academic media.

There Be Dragons Here…

At least that is what should be inscribed at the entrance to the supposed Ark Encounter theme park which apparently will include Dragons and Unicorns.

The biblical unicorn was a real animal, not an imaginary creature. … The absence of a unicorn in the modern world should not cause us to doubt its past existence. (Think of the dodo bird. It does not exist today, but we do not doubt that it existed in the past.). … To think of the biblical unicorn as a fantasy animal is to demean God’s Word, which is true in every detail.

I Have A Question For Believers…

…it is conceivable that, given the fragility of lifeforms on this planet, that there could have arisen certain circumstances in the development of the earth and life upon it that conspired to make it so that humankind never evolved to the point that it currently finds itself in. The evidence is there: 99.9% of every species that ever existed has gone extinct and even close ancestors of ours have gone extinct. We would not have been (and still are not) immune from that possibility.

In such a world, in the year 2011, without a single human being (homo sapiens sapiens) living and thinking on the face of the planet, what is the utility of God?