Acceptable In the 80s

Apparently, exams are getting easier. What a nightmare! It's funny as well, you know, because my lovely wife has sat her A2 exams this year. She's incredibly intelligent, having got three offers to do Dentistry (her first choice is King's College London, hence my new location!), and has worked her arse off every day to do the absolute best she can do - often working for 6, sometimes up to 8 hours a day.

I haven't seen her much since she started her A levels due to the incredible effort she has put into everything, which is fine - schoolwork comes first. What is surprising, however, is the news that all the exams in this country are ridiculously easy - thanks for that one, Michael Gove.

In order to redress the balance and return to the golden age of impossible exams, the impressively unintelligent Mr Gove has decided that the best thing to do is reintroduce O Levels and CSEs (Certificate of Secondary Education). For those not in the know, O Levels and CSEs were abolished (ironically by the Tories) in 1988 and replaced with modern GCSEs.

So what's the difference? Traditionally, O Levels were sat by more capable students, who you'd probably expect to achieve grades A* - B in equivalent GCSEs, and CSEs where sat by not-so-academic students, broadly equivalent to the Foundation tier in modern GCSEs where the highest achievable grade is a C.

So far, so similar. It is a blatantly tiered system, which is similar to most GCSEs which offer at least 2 tiers, higher (A* - C) and foundation (C - G), which Mathematics offering a mid-way Intermediate tier (B - E). The difference, however, is in the representation - if someone sat a foundation maths paper and achieved a C, there is nowhere on the GCSE certificate that specifically states it was foundation tier, as only the subject and grade are noted. That means that their C grade is technically equal with someone like me who sat the higher tier and also achieved a C, which is probably about right. The point is, that person who sat the foundation tier is not disadvantaged because of it and, if anything, it gives them a better chance at doing well as the paper is inline with their abilities.

Under the proposed system, children would be sorted into the O Level/CSE groups at 14. Currently, entries for tiered exams can be amended at any point - if a child suddenly starts pulling their socks up and does really well in maths, they might be bumped up from intermediate to higher to give them a better chance of fully realising their potential. With the proposed divide at 14, kids in the CSE groups wouldn't have a chance of transferring to the O level as they would be stuck on their particular course. Undoubtedly, those with CSEs would be shut out from the top Russell Group universities like Oxbridge et al, and university would once again be reseved for the elite. CSE students would be declaring on their CVs that their qualifications were CSEs and not O levels, which could further disadvantage them work-wise.

I don't know why I was so shocked to hear about this to be honest, as it really is typical Tory policy - university for the rich, menial jobs for the poor. Keep the poor squashed down as far as possible to let the privately educated 'cream of the crop' claim their rightful places at Oxford and Cambridge. Coming from the man who decided that every school needed bibles (newsflash: the unbelievably annoying Gideons already have youth indoctrination covered, thanks), it is extremely unsurprising to hear him dismissing modern qualifications as crap in favour of the elite public schools that put him where he is today.

If these plans go ahead, thousands of children will be disadvantaged and pushed further into poverty. Education is a right, not a privilege, and kids in this country deserve to be given a chance to grow into their studies and do well. We should be praising our high achieving students for working hard and doing a damn good job, not saying 'of course you did well - that exam was easy!'.

To all the candidates in this country who have finished or are sitting their GCSEs or AS/A2 levels at the moment, I wish you all the best of luck. Do yourselves a favour and ignore the deluge of stupid politicians whining about exam standards; enjoy the result of your hard work and let them bleat on with themselves. One day we might even have intelligent people running this country; stranger things have happened.

Equality Matters

There has been a lot of talk in the past few months about the 'gay marriage' issue (or equal marriage, as it should be known), and especially in the past week after that wonderfully progressive institution, the Church of England, decided to stick it's withered old oar into the debate.

I am one of the lucky ones, I tell myself. I have a civil partnership, which wasn't possible when me and my now-wife first started seeing each other as teenagers. We have legal rights akin to heterosexual married couples; there are no differences in terms of tax or inheritance that I know of, and we have the right to adopt and raise children with the protection of the state. There are people in American states who have no legal rights because they can't marry their partners and, worst of all, many people around the world who are persecuted and even killed for who they are and who they love.

All of the above are relevant points and, like I say, I feel lucky to be in the situation that I am in; but just because we have come this far doesn't mean there isn't more to be done. 'Separate but equal' still rings true in this country at the end of the day, and while some may say that words and semantics don't matter, I'd argue that they do.

To settle at this point would be akin to complacency. Do we accept that yes, we can have legal partnerships, but to call it a marriage is technically incorrect? Do we sit down and be thankful for the fact that we have civil partnerships or do we stretch that little bit further and ask for what we deserve - complete equality in the eyes of the law? Calling gay marriages 'civil partnerships' tells the world that we are still separate from the heteronormative values accepted by wider society. At best, it says that Britain are willing to be more progressive; at worst, it highlights that we are not like married couples and effectively appeases the aims of the 'militant gay agenda' as I have sometimes heard it called.

As far as the various religious organisations are concerned, I would also argue that marriage is nothing to do with religion. Marriage is a civil right - straight couples who hold any beliefs, religious or atheist, can get married at a registry office. People who have been divorced, who have been excommunicated, who are of every race on this planet can get married at a registry office. The only difference between me and these people is my sexual orientation. There is no valid argument against gay people being married - it is not illegal or immoral, does not lead to bestiality, paedophilia or incest. There is no proof to support the terrified voices shouting that equal marriage undermines the traditional family or heterosexual marriages; the only thing it undermines is the bigoted, outdated religious establishment that still has an inexplicable sway on Britain's politicians.

I see arguments against equal marriage and feel like an outsider looking in. I haven't done anything wrong; I work hard to support me and my wife and pay my taxes just like straight couples do. I give what is expected to this country and support it when I can, as does my wife. I am marginalised for being who I am and I cannot stand it - all I can think when I see this sort of prejudice on my TV before I leave for work is "what have I done to make you feel this way?". I simply cannot understand it, and I never will.

At a time where Britain lies in the murky mires of extreme Conservatism, I humbly ask our politicians not to think of equal marriage as a blight on society, but as a way of helping people like me feeling more like a part of things, like we matter. I ask that our Prime Minister fuel progress by allowing me the privilege of a marriage certificate - and for those MPs who would vote against it, just remember that this is not about policy; this is about tolerance, progression and, above all, people.

I don't want to destroy anyone else's marriage; I'd just, for once, like my relationship to be like everybody else's, and I don't think that's too much to ask.

A Change of Scenery

Hello internets! It's been a while since we last spoke...nearly 4 months I think? LOL.

This means, of course, that I have a few long blog posts I've been holding for a while now. I've been out of the loop as I've moved (and am still without proper internet - sorry, person who's internet I'm hijacking, but Y U HAVE NO PASSWORD?!) - I have a fabulous new job, having moved down to North London at the beginning of May, and my hopes are high for the missus to be starting a Dentistry course at Kings College London in September/October, depending of course on her A2 level results. Fingers crossed!!

So, without further ado, I shall start processing my many and varied thoughts to deposit into my virtual Jam Jars once again. Before we get to the opinion stuff, here is something unequivocally wonderful and cute - this is an absolute fact. You're welcome.

How Lost Girl Found Its Mojo

You know what didn't suck? The latest episode of Lost Girl, that's what! Surprising actually, considering that for the past couple of weeks I've been bored to tears by irritating douchebag characters (read: Ryan) and lacklustre plots. Here I was, getting ready to watch Sunday's episode with the familiar 'which character are they going to ruin this week' thought milling around my brain, when instead my thoughts sped from 'wait, WHAT?!' (in a good way, of course) to 'I am actually going to cry', via 'SHOW IS BREAKING MY HEART' and 'mission badass: completed'. Best episode in AGES - Lost Girl has officially got its mojo back!

[Pssssst. There be spoilers ahead. Sail on at your own peril.]


Alas, poor Doccubus - I knew them well!

As expected, given that we're now on episode 19 of 22, a few humongous developments in the whole 'can't sleep, Garuda'll eat me' arc are finally coming to fruition - Nadia's death was particularly gut-wrenching, and I just wanted to hug distraught Lauren until forever so she'd never have to cry again. It was so sad, and Nadia's last pleas to save herself and Lauren gave her character the noble end she deserved. What will be interesting now is how this changes her relationship with Bo; she's sure as hell not going to be able to forget that her beloved succubus killed the woman she loved and looked after for over 5 years, no matter the motive. Let's just hope the writers don't decide to make her go to that crazy insane place we saw 'Lauren' in for season 3...

The Best of the BFFs

This week was almost like a will they/won't they, except in terms of our Dynamic Duo and their presumed inseparability - we all knew Kenzi would stick by her favourite Suckyaface, but she definitely sacrificed a lot to get to that point. This is what I love about that tiny human: she is one of the strongest characters on the show, and yet she's 'just a human'. Goes to show that what makes a great TV character is fabulous writing, not superpowers (I'm looking at you, thankfully-now-departed Heroes). That little scene at the end totally broke my heart and really brought back a feeling of the essence of season 1 - that feeling that the world is darker than we can all stand sometimes, but that there's kindness to be found in unusual places and done in unusual ways; it emphasises that universal truth that I really think season 1 hammered home - the noblest path is rarely the easiest.

The deep-rooted almost-cryingness nearly leaking from my eyes wasn't helped by this beautiful, ethereal song from Agnes Obel, who I will be iTunes-ing for some time. The song in that last teary scene is called 'Close Watch', and here it is on YouTube. Enjoy.

The Trouble With Skyrim

I’ve been fortunate enough to play some fantastic Xbox 360 games since I bought the console in October last year (I know, I’m very late to the party), having thoroughly enjoyed titles like Mass Effect 1 & 2, the Assassin’s Creed series and Portal 2. I’ve been spoiled for choice in the Awesome Games department, so I was even more excited to add The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to my collection after my lovely wife bought the game for me for Christmas.

Best Christmas present EVER, I thought. I couldn’t wait to get back home and absorb myself in the beautiful vistas I’d seen online, preparing to fight dragons and save the world, one swashbuckle at a time. For a while, Skyrim did more than meet my lofty expectations; I was thrust into landscapes I had dreamed about in games since The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (a game which hadn’t been as good as I expected it to be) where I was free to go and do whatever I wanted to do. As it happened, what I wanted to do was explore the world – I visited all sorts of random places on the map until I eventually found myself in Whiterun. I began The Companions questline, thinking it would be a fun diversion with a result that would hopefully pay off, and the quests seemed kind of interesting anyway. I breezed through the easier quests and returned to The Companions’ headquarters, Jorrvaskr, [SPOILER ALERT] to find a swathe of dead Companions thanks to The Silver Hand. What I did not expect was to be prevented from finishing the quest thanks to an epic bug which stops the character you need to speak to from advancing the questline for you. I was stuck, and all because I had one tiny little miscellaneous quest (‘Retrieve the helm of Windhelm’) unfulfilled in my journal. To say I was annoyed was to put it mildly; I thought about starting a new game with a new character but, pissed off as I was, I instead took the mature way out and refused to play the game.

This is the heart of the trouble with Skyrim: you could invest a ridiculous number of hours playing the game, only to come across one little obstacle that stops you in your tracks. It is an enormous virtual world that Bethesda has created, so I completely understand that spotting bugs can be an obscure and almost endless process, but for an ENTIRE SIDE-QUEST line (and quite a prominent side quest at that) to be broken by one tiny little open miscellaneous quest you have to be fairly unobservant. A quick internet search for the ‘Forever Mourning’ bug, as my experience has been dubbed by other players, shows that there are a great many people affected by this one issue. So why wasn’t this spotted during play testing for the game before it was released? I have yet to play another game (apart from Oblivion, natch) sporting this many playability issues on general release. Mass Effect 2 is a pretty big game, and I’ve experienced one single, solitary bug on a later mission – this bug fixed itself once I reloaded the game, so it was no big deal.

Whatever, I thought. I decided I’d wait for the latest patch to be released for the game and come back to it at a later date, which happened to be earlier this week. The bug I had resolved itself and I was able to complete the questline as expected – win. I was absorbed again, back in love with everything Skyrim has to offer; like a joyous reunion with an old flame, I came back again and again, trying out some new side quests this time.

Also like a reunion with a past loved one, I ignored the little things that used to annoy me for a while – when the game crashed, I put it down to too many hours spent on Netflix beforehand. When it took an inordinate length of time to load anything, I attributed it to the game cache, which I then dutifully cleared. These were minor inconveniences that I wasn’t going to let get in the way of what was otherwise a pretty seamless gaming experience. At least I was, until I came across another pothole in the road – another glitched questline, this time thanks to joining the Imperial army. Legate Rikke decided she didn’t really want to talk to me about halfway through the quests meaning that, despite my efforts to reunite the good people of Skyrim, I was doomed to failure. I’m stuck in limbo and, this time, it’ll be a bit longer until I go back.

I still love Skyrim – we’re good friends, and I’m sure we’ll see each other again occasionally, but until the wrinkles are emphatically ironed out I think it’ll be a good while until we meet again. What a shame.

Freedom Isn't Free

As darkness descends upon the internet, one fact shines still brightly among the gloom: freedom is no longer free. Freedom is a dangerous and unaffordable commodity which must be wrestled into submission at any cost, especially if you've got the muscles to do it.

I write this at what I consider to be a possible turning point in modern history; much has been written about the USA's SOPA/PIPA situation as well as the rough UK equivalent, the Digital Economy Act (I wrote about this a couple of years ago - see here), as we enter yet another chapter of the fight against piracy and copyright infringement - or, as I like to put it, Rupert Murdoch faceless corporations vs. the people. It takes some thinking to imagine a world without the internet as it is at the moment, to conjure an image of state-approved websites and lawsuits for the unapproved; the internet, brought to life by so, so many, controlled by so very few.

Certain things have changed already, that much is true - the face of P2P sharing has been given a few ugly scars thanks to the misuse of Napster, Kazaa, Usenet and BitTorrent (to name but a few), and even websites like YouTube are infinitely more judicious about the use or misuse of copyrighted material than they used to be. Threatening to censor websites in their entirety, however, is more than a step too far. Copyright holders - specifically distributors and the like - need to realise that it is they who should change, not the users. If a consumer sees value in something, they'll buy it; Netflix's streaming service is a fantastic example of the way media consumption has evolved and is still evolving. If I can watch a movie in HD via my Xbox, paying a small monthly fee, why the hell would I want to download it instead?

There will always be pirates on the internet - and you can rest assured they'll usually be three steps ahead of the authorities - but the vast majority of users consume media responsibly, and are willing to pay for it; the very fact that the film, music and video games industries, for example, are worth billions proves this fact. But SOPA/PIPA are about more than just the pirates; this is all about controlling the freedom of the internet in favour of the corporations who are regularly tarred and feathered by the masses. It's about controlling information at the source, throttling the truth and the views of those who make it what it is. It's about censorship, plain and simple, and it's this I cannot stand.

The internet gives power to the people; it was us that made it what it is today, in all its random, wonderful craziness. It belongs to us, and so it damn well should. Not being a US citizen, I can't ring my Senator and explain this to them, but if you're lucky enough to be in the US you can: icanhazcheeseburger.com has a full list of their telephone numbers, so get on the phone to support the internet if you can.

I leave you with this marvellous video from the aforementioned esteemed purveyors of LOLcats:

...What's That Coming Over the Hill?

Happy 2012 everyone! Now we’ve got the holiday season out of the way and have mostly sobered up, how’s about a look to the year ahead in American politics? Specifically – have you seen the latest bunch of crazy mentalists they’re calling Republican leader candidates? If Armageddon is coming this December, at least there’s comfort that these strange idiots will be no more.

As you may have guessed, I am not a US citizen and, whilst I have a ceaseless love for US TV shows and a lot of the culture in general, I wouldn’t want to be an American – particularly not an LGBT American, given the current state of affairs highlighted by the recent Iowa caucus. It never fails to shock me just how valuable an asset one’s religious beliefs and stance on homosexuality (or, in most cases, degree of homophobia) can be when it comes to getting votes. Two out of three candidates declared ‘winners’ on Tuesday’s caucus vote, the first step in determining this year’s Republican presidential candidate, have happily shouted their homophobic views into the world’s collective ears, and most of the other high-profile candidates have been vying for the Homophobe of the Year Award with gigantic smiles on their faces.

Michele Bachman, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum – these are the most high-profile candidates given the media space to vent their anti-LGBT views whilst their ignorant supporters swallow it all without even a drop of irony. Thankfully, Smiling Robot of the Future (model MORON4000) Michelle Bachman decided to give up the campaign trail thanks to poor results in Iowa, so we’ll no more have to put up with her sycophantic, Palin-esque rictus grins – at least not until next time around, anyway. Mitt Romney, Mormon-extraordinaire, and Super Preacher Rick Perry, who has now declared himself back in the race after taking 0.133546874546 seconds ‘out’ of the race to think about it, are pretty off the wall crazy homophobes, but the one left that really scares me, the monster that seemed to have come out of nowhere and swept the state of Iowa with him, is Santorum.

An Evangelical Christian, Santorum represents one of the greatest threats to the LGBT community, which is belligerence and ignorance in equal measure. He has repeatedly presented homosexuality as a defect, a sort of strange sexual fetish akin to incest, paedophilia, adultery and bestiality, whilst apparently being ignorant to the fact that, apart from our sexual orientation, gay people are no different to anyone else and deserve to be treated accordingly. If elected, he has pledged to instantly annul same-sex marriages granted under the Democratic government and ban the ‘practice’ nationwide; he has also promised to re-instate the notorious ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ rule for the US Army and Navy.

If at this point you’re convinced that a) I’m making it all up or b) that the Democrats have somehow infiltrated the Republican party and provided them with the most ridiculous, unelectable candidates, then I’m afraid you may need to hit yourself in the head with something large, blunt and heavy. In a world where Hillary Clinton (who is basically my hero of 2011) can stand up in a UN meeting and talk candidly and bluntly about how LGBT rights are human rights, there is absolutely no way that this outright condemnation and discrimination should be allowed to continue. All these people are doing is reinforcing the long-held prejudices borne out of the same hatred of difference that spawns racism and xenophobia and, while I am an advocate of complete freedom of speech even when I don’t agree with the speaker’s views, there is no way that in 2012 we as a community should be facing this kind of low-brow, backwards moral criticism from the leader of a political party. If David Cameron came out with this kind of crap (let’s ignore his recent ‘we are a Christian country’ speech for a couple of minutes) he’d be hung, drawn and quartered, then probably roasted on a spit and fed to the Queen’s Corgis for lunch. Why is this not the case in America? How is it that a modern, world-defining country at the forefront of so much internationally can be, with this issue and several others regarding minorities, be so irretrievably stuck in the dark ages?

Either way, Obama’s probably got a fairly easy ride of it this year. After all, if you had to choose between a guy who’s favourite pastime is shouting abuse into your face with a megaphone or a guy who was hyped to be amazeballs but is actually pretty useless (yet mostly harmless), who would you choose?