slatterly

I highly agree with ckuehner. I wouldn't think violent games would prompt people to do the violent things in real life - why would they, if they can already shoot people/beat them up in the game? Violent video games are just an outlet. Anyone who can be driven to violence just by playing a few rounds of Street Fighter, or whatever, obviously had some problems already, and it's useless to blame the trigger when you could actually do something about the problem.People blaming video games or loud music for violence reminds me of the Japanese solution to their climbing suicide rates. Did they consider what their strenuous exams were doing to teen stress levels and adjust accordingly? No, they just put fences around school roofs so people couldn't jump off anymore. That's pretty lazy, if you ask me, not to mention it doesn't actually solve anything. Same with finding media scapegoats.

Finally, a way to put the world's chronic sex obsession to good use. Bravo to the British!

I like layout two the best; very bold, but professional looking. I do like the layout of number three, but the color scheme is rather bland. You might consider modifying it to the red and gold of the second layout, I really like that color scheme.

That seems quite needlessly sexist to me. Some girls cry very easily. Some don't. Some have that eye condition that means they can't cry even if they want to. It's the same with guys, although they also have that stigma that means they're considered girly-men if they cry. Which I detest, because everyone cries. (Unless they have that eye condition.) If you've ever been a baby, you've cried, because that's how you manage to draw breath for the first time.If you make a blanket statement like 'girls cry because of this', it's definitely going to be wrong for vast numbers of people. So there's really no point to it.

My first name either means 'little rock' or 'handsome'.Interestingly enough, my middle name roughly means 'son of handsome'. So according to my name I'm the handsome son of a handsome person. Wow, that's weird.

I'm fifteen, and I always feel kind of embarassed admitting it. I've always considered myself to be a lot older than I am, so actually thinking that 'yeah, I'm still in highschool' is a bit of a nasty shock. (Although I sometimes get a kick out of having better grammar than people older than me. It's really just instinct for me, unless English is someone's second language I really don't get how they have such a problem with it. Faulty education system, I guess... and oh my aching back, when I was your age...)

It's like in Godzilla! Nneh, if we assume dragons are everything the classical legends say they are, they're not very biologically likely. Something that big probably couldn't even get off the ground, let alone fly steadily, and the fire-breathing thing is just crazy. My guess is that dragon legends started when some ancients found dinosaur skeletons and couldn't figure out what they belonged to. So, they designed dragons, and made them all fanciful because that's what people liked to do back then. Before they had proper knowledge of physics and the dynamics of flight and all that.

(Addendum to my previous post) You might as well ask what a girl sees in a boy - I suspect the answers would be somewhat similar. I can't speak for everyone, of course, but what attracts me about the male figure as opposed to the female is musculature. A traditional masculine figure just looks more real and healthy than the typical stick-thin model. If you ask me, I can't see what guys see in girls. Guess it's just a matter of perspective. (As a side note, I'm often amused to see people in these kinds of arguments say "yes, I support gay marriage - but I'm not gay, of course". I guess I'm just an anomaly, then? Heh.)

The thing about taking the Bible and saying "God says this is wrong" is that no one can really know what the Bible originally said. Consider the 'thou shalt not lie with man as you do with women' (paraphrased) from Leviticus; looking at the 'original' Hebrew, this could really mean 'do not sleep with men while you sleep with women' (i.e. if you're going to be gay don't pretend to be straight) or even 'don't sleep with a man in the same bed as you sleep with a woman'. Similarly, was there ever any explicit statement that the sin of Sodom (commonly called sodomy) is actually homosexual sex, as our modern definition claims? The Sodomites were guilty of a lot of things. Sodomy could mean rape or not respecting strangers. There was no mention in the Bible that I can remember that said "sodomy is the practice of homosexual sex". And even looking at the 'original' Hebrew (and other languages) isn't always fail-safe. A lot of these stories were almost definitely started by oral tradition, and so naturally went through a lot of mutations and embellishments before they were written down (which may have caused all the various contradictions - and they are there. An example that springs to mind are the two different creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2, which put things into two quite seperate orders. The Skeptic's Annotated Bible lists several more of these). The texts must have been copied out countless times if they've survived 'till today, and so have been at the mercy of their transcribers. Maybe some passages were blurred or illegible, and the scribe had to make a guess at what they said. Maybe someone down the line just really wasn't comfortable with homosexuality. Taking a verse and saying "this says that [insert concept here] is wrong is really like that woman who denounced foreign languages by saying "If the English language was good enough for the prophet Isaiah, it's good enough for me". I heartily agree that religion is a personal choice and we have no right to tell someone to stop believing what they do. But if it expects that treatment from others, then the church can't go around saying that the state can't marry who it wants. I would never expect a church to marry a homosexual couple against its wishes, but at the same time I heartily support the state's decision to pass gay marriage laws. I'm very much in favor of gay marriage and I'm very happy that my country has allowed it, but again, if we started telling churches they had to do the same then I would not support that at all. Personally, I'm not religious, but I think there's a good chance that Jesus existed at one point or another (his status as Son of God or mortal prophet is debatable, and not realy relevant here). I think that Jesus was a pretty swell guy, and that if he were around today he would be hanging out with the gays and the trannies and all the other social rejects. That's exactly what he did two thousand years ago, and exactly what he preached - love and acceptance.

Ditto. I don't have an iPod, just a measly 124 meg MP3 player, but if I were to get an iPod I'd definitely get a 20 gig. I've only got about 2 gigs of music on my computer right now, but I'm always buying more and I'd hate to buy a mini and then have to get something else when that fills up. Really, the 20 gigs are a great value compared to the minis. $200 for 4 gigs and $250 for 6 gigs, compared with $300 for 20 gigs and $400 for 60 gigs; you can get 15 times the space for only 2 times the price. So if you end up filling a 4 gig and have to get a new one, you've already spent as much as you would have for 60 gigs. I'd definitely stick to the higher end.

In response to the 'copyright and the internet' issue, I believe if someone copies your work online and does not remove it after you notify them, you can go to their server and notify them. No one wants a plaigarist on their servers, so action will usually be taken. HTML Goodies has some things to say about copyright, mostly the same sorts of things mentioned here. That's where I got the above information, too.)

I've always thought that the in-book synopses were usually just to give readers a refresher, so they're reminded of past events and can keep them fresh in their minds as they read. Isaac Asimov said something like this about his Foundation series - every time he wrote a new story, he had to go back and read all the others to make sure he got all the details right. It would get quite tedious if we had to go back and re-read (or re-watch) all the preceding books/movies every time a new one came out. Lately I've been reading Arthur C. Clarke, and I've noticed that in his 2001 series, he tends to copy large chunks out of previous books. I know I've seen the excerpt about Europan life at least three times now. That, to me, gets almost as tedious as the rereading-all-the-books method; the best kind of synopsis is the kind that can be fitted seamlessly into the narrative, as sort of a gentle reminder of the past rather than a full-on "this is what happened the last time".