Ben 10

Sat, 12 May 2007 06:42:14 GMT

This show is so cool! Especially for something that came out of America. For anyone who doesn't know, it's about a kid who turns into aliens thanks to a funky watch that crash landed from space. Sound super typical of me? That's coz my last cartoon-based obsession was Danny Phantom, about a kid who turns into a ghost thanks to an accident in his parents lab. My favourite alien on Ben 10 is Ghostfreak. Looks like I'm getting way too predictable.

No alternative

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 01:01:09 GMT

Health fears as young become screen zombies

But what alternatives have we? What else is there for us to do? This is an age of crazy paranoia about 'stranger-danger', and one where insurance stops us from doing the fun but admittedly more injury-prone activities. As a kid I was devastated when both the parks near my house had the playgrounds safety treated. The big slides and tall wooden bridges, the monkey bars and wobbly seesaws all got replaced with low to the ground, plastic and rubber things, with tiny slides and boredom everywhere. They went from being fun for 12 yr olds to being fun for kiddies 5 and under.

My Dad tells me stories of him going out and doing mischief, back when you were able to set off your own mini fireworks and you didn't need your parents to know where you were 24-7. He went out and played sport with his mates. But now you gotta worry about rapists (who actually aren't that common), so you can't just go out, and only Canberra seems to allow firecrackers anymore. And it doesn't help when you try to organise things, but all your friends are just as lazy. It's not as easy to get out and play sport, because for that you need a team, but our culture has changed so that it's almost impossible to gather enough people to resemble teams. Maybe that's not a strong argument, but I'll try it from my own experience.

For me, it's incredibly hard to find any social activity that promotes exercise. I'm told often enough that I should go out, but where, with who? As a female, the stereotype suggests I should go out and shop, even though I don't have the money and find fashion to be incredibly boring. In fact I find most products to be boring. When I do go shopping with a bunch of friends, it's like hell, especially when I'm about the only person who can't see the point in it all (you can take offence if you want, guys, but you know that's just me). Movies are much better, but they're getting crapper and crapper as time goes on, so that's something that I can't do that often. And even greater a problem, is that most time's I'm the only person who wants to see a particular movie. So going to shopping centres with my friends is a pretty bad alternative to screen entertainment, with little incentive in terms of having any real fun.

What also buggers me is that I happen to live in an area where I have no friends close by. So it's not like I can just ring someone up and say, "let's go to the park and kick a ball". My area also has pretty much nothing to do in it. Just more crap shopping. So even if I did ring someone, they're hardly gonna want to come to my little hole anyway. So I'm always gonna have to travel for a lot longer than I want to, and travel always costs money. And since I'm unlikely to be thrilled about where I'm going, there's not that much point to travelling in the first place. So I stay at home.

Now do guys have it any better? Well if they're anything like my brother, they'll be a lot happier to play cyber sport than real sport. In my opinion, they're more likely to go out and do something interesting like surfing, but we're talking about kids and teens here, who either need a driver or have to get public transport. They're just as likely to think the effort too much, so why not stay at home. Then if you live near someone, you might go to their place, but it seems they just watch TV or play PS2 anyway. Even if they do things, that doesn't help me, coz they wouldn't take me along, or if they did then I'd be isolated and I might as well have just gone by myself, which isn't much fun, so I should just stay at home.

Maybe I'm just antisocial, but you can see my problem there. And not just mine either. I used to at least have vacation care, but they only take you 'till you're 12ish. Those programs are good because they organise buses to get you to fun places. But once they're gone, there's not much left. When you stay at home because there's no alternative, there are very few things you can do. You could make a mess cooking or burning things, but eventually you're gonna have to clean it up which is a bummer. You can read, but it's not always easy to find good material. You could do some art, but there's only so much you can take at a time. Then there are the screens. Easy and mindnumbing, they make you pass time in an instant. In a world of boredom, computer games and TV are such a good distraction from reality that you forget how friggin' bored you are. And technology is so good that their everywhere. What else can we do?

So what's the solution? It's hard, since this is a competitively capitalist society. Else you could set up more things for kiddies and teens to do. Advertising doesn't help, coz you just brainwash kiddies to shop, inevitably for more screens. Maybe we just need to set off a massive EMP bomb and kill our electricity, coz I can't see a way out. My idealistic views are shared by bugger all, so if I say "let's just all change our attitude" it isn't going to happen.

I think we're stuffed. But nature has it's ways. If this problem causes us to suffer, we'll just die off and the strongest will survive. Perhaps obesity is nature's warning and we not only need to listen, but need to figure out what to do and then do it. GRASFSDFGHWRHEHJNELHA!!!! *tears at hair in frustration*

I wish I could build my own utopia, but I'll end up being the only one in it.

dragonlugia: Entertainment

Ben 10

No alternative