Month: September 2015

Do you know what Opposition is?

It isn’t complaining about what the government is doing. It isn’t voting against them on every single item. It’s building up a coalition of voters so that when the next election comes the incumbent government will have to moderate their policy in the face of potential removal.

What you’re actually going to get here is bolstering of Tory support, because now they can point to the shambles that’s began from day one and say ‘look at Labour, isn’t it sad that they sunk to this, can’t even agree amongst each other, their leader cannot lead, the country simply isn’t safe with him, you’re going to have rely on us now, but it’s okay because we’re going to do our best to be more inclusive whilst they’re finger pointing and protesting’.

Unless there is serious, serious danger of an overwhelming backlash against themselves the Tories will continue to do what they’ve been doing, and now they will feel confident that they can do it for several more terms. They’ve already begun to brand Corbyn Labour and if you think that it’s because they’re scared you’re simply deluded. They know exactly how to play this out, it’s a battle they’ve fought and won time and time again for the best part of 100 years. They’re taught how to handle Corbyns from the very first day of secondary school.

The only opposition is one which can extract the soft ground from the Tories. A one which can bring the middle class into the tent, one which will assure EVERYBODY that a better life will exist under Labour. Picketing, rallies and protests will never draw mass appeal in Britain. 500,000 of my fellow Labour members is a microcosm of the electorate, it’s not a mass movement, it’s not an opposition. It’s political seppuku.

If Corbyn were a shrewd political operator, a great orator, a rhetorician who commanded confidence and loyalty, a decisive leader who could weather a storm maybe this would be different. He isn’t. He’s a ditherer, he’s already dithering. He’s got no leadership experience, he doesn’t command an army. He’s a sympathetic figure with a blacklist of misconstrued comments and associations, elevated to the purple by a praetorian guard of clowns and fools.

It matters not a fucking jot what he stands for, if he cannot work out how to stand for it without damaging the cause.

The very public castration of Clive Nicebloke

There’s this Zoo, yeah. You following? Right.

The Zoo is owned by a hands off bloke, he kind of lets things run as the staff decide it should be run. The Zoo staff used to be managed by Boring McDour, a nice scottish bloke . The Zoo has been through some hard times recently. A few years ago a virus broke out amongst the hippos, it leaped to the big cat enclosure and before anyone knew what was going on the bears were fucked and the elephants were trying to mate with the dead. McDour did his best to limit the damage, but he ended up being thrown out when his contract ended. He couldn’t shake the virus situation even though he didn’t have much to do with it, and did a good job when it happened. People said he spent too much money on vets and fruit, so it was only natural that the operation should balls up when a bit of bother hit.

After McDour’s clean up, the customers got together and demanded that a smartly dressed young accountant, named John Bastard would get the job. People still liked McDour, but he was just so bloody dour that John Bastard got in anyway, even though they all knew John Bastard was a dickhead.

Thing was, John Bastard had a good team around him. They knew that the customers didn’t fancy paying so much to go to the zoo. The animals would be fine if they stripped back on some luxuries. People didn’t get to see when you took them out back and shot them in the face to finish them off if they were ill, all they really cared about was having a walk about the zoo in the sunshine and they happily bought John Bastard’s schtick, because they’d thoroughly convinced themselves that it was probably a good job they had any zoo to go to in the first place.

After a while, a handful of the zoo go-ers started to kick up a bit of a fuss. They had placards and they picketed a bit. The people queueing up to get in wondered what all the fuss was about. The animals had their basic necessities. They thought it was worth cutting the entrance fee if it meant that the monkeys had to lose out on a proper tire swing. They saw the protestors and thought ‘What a bunch of wankers. They should be at work, like I am half the day. I didn’t come to the zoo to be patronised by a bunch of hippies’. Meanwhile, the protestors got madder and madder at the disinterest of the zoo-goers. Why didn’t they care about the welfare of the animals? Couldn’t they see that the happier the animals were, the more efficient the zoo would be? Didn’t they realise that a few extra pounds on top of the ticket price would make everyone happier, the animals better off, ultimately leading to a rather brilliant Zoo as it once was? Nobody stood up for the protesters, really. A zoo manager named Andy Amiable challenged John Bastard for the running of the zoo, and for a while it looked like he might win. However the protesters decided that he didn’t go far enough, and called him worse names than they did John Bastard. John Bastard won a surprise victory. Andy Amiable stepped down, and a bunch of others scrambled for his old job. Who would lead the anti-bastard brigade at the zoo?

The protesters decided to take matters into their own hands. And Amiable, they thought, had lost his way. He didn’t want it badly enough. He rejected their ideas of marriage for animals, passports for fish and a free bicycle for every bipedal. They didn’t understand that the public might think they were enormous bellends, because more people would come to join the protest. To them it was a matter of time before the zoo-goers moved from the queue to the picket. All it would take was somebody who truly, truly put the animal welfare above profits. They found their man in Clive Nicebloke, a bearded 60 year old Janitor who had been kept on the fringes of the zoo for many, many years. Nicebloke was an old school zookeeper. He believed that bears had human rights, although he was deeply skeptical of the pigeons, they having bred and multiplied in the butterfly enclosure to the point where the butterfly’s only had a little box to live in. People were mostly on the pigeon’s side following the great pigeon kill off of the last century, but Nicebloke stuck firm to his principles.

There was nobody else for the protesters to back, basically. So they got Nicebloke into the job, even though Nicebloke had a potted history of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. He hung out with animal traffickers and invited them to the reptile house, because he thought it would be sensible to hear both sides of the argument. He sympathised with the Orangutan who beat Barbara Trout to death with her very own plimsole. He once told his colleagues at the Zoo that it was quite right for a stork to pick on the pigeons, because they’d caused trouble in the first place. The customers were deeply skeptical of Clive Nicebloke, but the protesters adored him.

The protesters had been warned that Nicebloke, whilst still a nice bloke, would be utterly destroyed by the cunning John Bastard and his cronies. They had 30 years of silly comments about animals, vets treating furry patients with magic water, the unfettered guilt of the pigeons. The customers watched what was going on with total confusion; in principle they kind of agreed with Nicebloke, but he was just so silly and unmagnificent compared to John Bastard that they decided to stick with what they had long before John Bastard had to go back and ask them to back him again.

Nicebloke was thrown to the wolves. As the Wolves were biting off his bits, the protesters stood aghast. How did this happen? Why didn’t anyone see this coming?

John Bastard eventually sold off so much of the zoo that the animals were pitted against one another, the weakest being eaten alive by the strongest. All the while John Bastard and his cronies clapped and jeered. The protesters began to wonder whether they were the problem all along. ‘It’s not fair!’ They shouted. It went ahead anyway, because there was nobody with any power to stop it.

Fission Mailed: 7 Tips for playing MGSV: The Phantom Pain

Yo yiggidy yo, fellow inside-out triple bluff super spies.

I was lucky enough to receive MGSV a week early and I’ve been hammering it. Now that I’m about halfway through the game, I thought I’d share some tips to help newcomers get to grips with the difficulty. MGSV can be hard, but there are always options as to how you handle it. Don’t worry, it’s story-spoiler free, but I have mentioned some gameplay unlock stuff.

The game has a definite gameplay loop that will turn you into an infiltration crack head, so nail it early and reap the rewards. Later in the game, the Mother Base stuff can become a bottleneck for progress, so nip that shit in the bud early and start building up your forces.

GET YOURSELF A VANTAGE POINT

No more radar. That particular crutch is gone, but there are replacements. The binoculars can be used to tag enemies, and later they’ll tell you everything you need to know about the target and their stats. Before you begin sneaking, get yourself up high and spend five minutes or so picking out targets. You’ll never get every soldier from a single vantage point, but you’ll soon get used to working out where the others should be by tagging the ones with a visible patrol. This is the core of your strategy. Early tagging and a good understanding of what lies ahead lets you mark the best soldiers to fulton back to Mother Base, accelerating the access to the higher tier gear that enables the crumbly goodness of an S Rank. S Rank is required for a few missions toward the end of the game, so you’ll be replaying missions at some point. No use worrying about that for now, anyway. Mark your targets before you get moving.

INTERROGATION IS HABITUAL

You’ll open up side-ops and missions that let you snatch an interpreter soon after entering a new area. The interpreter can, um, interpret. This means you can now interrogate the dudes you’re grabbing before you knock that sucker out. Interrogation works in a cycle. The first guy you interrogate will give you some info about the map and maybe mark up other soldiers you didn’t see when you were surveying from your vantage point.
Each guy you interrogate will open up a little more information on the map, so as part of your strategy you should be working out who the best four guys to snatch early on will be. You can then adapt your path through the map to pick up the goodies as you go. Blueprints and prisoners are often hard to find unless someone tells you where they are first, so ask around.

TRANQUILIZE AND KNOCK OUT ENEMIES WHERE YOU CAN

MGSV is a lot like Dishonoured in that it gives you a million and one ways to kill people, but 2 or 3 ways to incapacitate them. Remember, every solider on the map can be whisked back to Mother Base and that should be your first objective, especially for any with a C or above in any skill set. You will not be able to fulton any dead soldiers, and dead men can’t talk. Feel free to kill the useless D and E drones from distance, but avoid killing anyone or anything with a decent stat. Knock them out instead.

Also, you can easily rouse any enemies that you tranq or knock out once they’re on the ground. If you’re in danger of being spotted, you can always take them out from distance with the tranquilizer and then wake them up when you’re close to interrogate, before knocking them out again and then fultoning back to Mother Base. Get into the habit of doing this early on and your Mother Base will grow much, much faster.

FULTON EVERYTHING YOU CAN

You’ll want to get in the habit of fultoning pretty much everything not nailed to the ground. As your fulton capability expands, you get more opportunities to send things back before a re-supply and you can send bigger stuff, too.

The enemies can spot the fulton balloon if they’re up high or nearby, so make sure you clear a path before sending somebody back. Mother Base has capacity limits so try and build and upgrade as quickly as you can, whilst sending back as many skilled soldiers as possible. Again, this is vital for the late game, which could become grindy if you don’t start early.

D.D IS SUPER USEFUL

You’ll find D.D pretty early, and it’ll take a while for him to become available as a buddy. Once he’s ready to be deployed, he’s a god send. D.D’s main ability is being able to spot enemies, prisoners, items and animals around the map. Approach a base with D.D at your side and the place will light up like a christmas tree, with unseen enemies tagged thanks to your doggies’ super sense of smell.

Later you can equip him with his own weapons, and he’ll carry a knife in his mouth like some super-badass version of Sif from Dark Souls. He gets a stun knife too, and you can send him to pick off soldiers in the centre of your field of vision that you can’t get close enough to.

EVERYWHERE YOU GO, ALWAYS TAKE EXPLOSIVES WITH YOU

The game judges you on being seen and on being shot. Once you can make C4 and a rocket launcher, you can blow things up. Even though you’re alerting enemies you still won’t be seen if you do it from distance, so it won’t affect your ranking.

Blowing up anti-aircraft equipment will allow you to call in the chopper to more areas of the map, making some of the side-ops backtracking a little easier. Plus, it makes you feel like a full blown soldiering god. Later in the game you’ll see a lot more heavy equipment, with patrol helicopters and other vehicles. Planting C4 and then getting on with the job, or rocketing from an unseen vantage point will take out the stress of a lot of the missions ahead. There’s something ridiculously cool about planting C4 all over and then blowing it up one by one when you’re about to leave the hot zone.

STEALTH IS STILL THE BEST OPTION

Sure, sometimes you’ll want to fight your way in and out, but if you get yourself into a sneaky mindset early you will adapt to the game much more quickly. By following the above advice you’ll soon find that extraction missions in particular are so much easier. The enemy soldiers are clever and their eyesight is good, but the sandbox nature of the maps mean that you can usually enter areas from pretty much any direction.

Soon after the beginning you’ll get access to the sneaking suit, which dampens your footsteps and makes grabbing enemies much easier. D.D gets his own sneaking suit too, and who doesn’t like a dog in armour?