dom.blog

Going through a two-hour mental endurance test, I went to the Hillsong Church in London today, to see for myself the sort of techniques used by an evangelical cult.

All the usual traits are there – “hosts” with their disturbing smiles, a charismatic leader, loud music, etc. While I believe that any religion is a cult by definition, Hillsong is very intense. Many churchs peddle their lies in a low-key, ‘drip drip’ fashion so that people simply become used to the tradition and ceremony. In contrast, Hillsong brims with energy as hundreds of people appear to be having epileptic fits at once.

It’s very scary – but worth seeing if you prepare yourself for it beforehand. Unfortunately humans seem to have evolved to be incredibly suggestible, joyfully welcoming a lengthy attack on the individual. Rows upon rows of people, often with large amounts of common sense otherwise, jump up and down [I’m not kidding] like zombies, ‘surrending’ to God and gobbling down stories about the creation of the world in 6 days, and where to buy the latest Hillsong CD.

Financially, this works – Hillsong has a video wall while many old, more traditional churchs struggle to maintain their buldings with a dwindling amount of visitors. It’s a very slick operation, the mental equivalent of a dose of heroin without the hassle of a needle. And it proves that we should fight the theft of people’s ability to think as hard as we possibly can.

You know that feeling when suddenly you’ve got piles of work to do? I swear, without Outlook’s Task Pane I’d be completely lost.

Anyway – PC4 was delivered today, the fastest I’ve ever experienced Dell ship a system to us. Nucleus released version 3.2 which everyone has been busy upgrading to, mainly for the increased protection from comment spam. I installed it yesterday and will be implementing certain features shortly. However, I’ve also returned instant commenting for the most recent posts, since the Blacklist and automatic IP blocking has been working a treat.

Finally – the media blitz for Doctor Who has well and truly started. More trailers, more scenes, more press coverage… it’s very exciting! (And yes, leaked episode, it happens for everything these days and has even managed to generate some extra publicity. Cool!)

Now it’s time to memorise some Spanish words for another test, and maybe go to bed once in a while as well.

Edit – how could I forget, my day also involved organising our section of the Year 11 yearbook. I lost the ‘most likely to be first to earn a million pounds’ contest by one vote. Rats…

I’m in a really great mood, and so I thought I’d completely rip off Nathan’s latest dose of blogging to bring you an account of my fantastic spending spree at PC World. (No don’t worry, didn’t buy a computer there. And I wasn’t paying either!)

For PC1, bought circa 1999, we got another XP upgrade, 256MB of extra RAM, a Belkin wireless network card and a table to keep it all on. All for Natasha’s room, a proper little upgrade for the oldest networked PC.

Then, after being brought down to earth for a while to assemble the bloody table (we did it the wrong way round – twice) it was time to order PC4 from trust ol’ Dell. 3.2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive and a lovely 19″ flat screen to sit on my dad’s desk. And finally, my wish to standardise a home network on XP SP2 will be complete. No more blue screen, no more crashing and burning Windows 9x, just pure XP bliss. And not a Mac in sight Pingu – we like our computers to come with monitors included. :-p

My good mood even extended to hunting down a bunch of obscure music for Tash. Including Steps. Proof that technology does not bring you taste.

– No maths teacher (he’s been off skiing) means no work has been done, instead we’ve listened to our supply teacher lament “you people, who think you’re so hip and cool, come to school and do nothing!” He has a point I suppose; I am hip and cool. :-p

– Science trip on Thursday was much more exciting than expected. Owls flying about, things exploding, electron microscopes. Oh, and I had to run madly through London to make it back after lunch. Mental note – Big Ben has a clock on it for a reason.

– The Kye Kye Hope Trust, a very worthy organisation whose website is being worked on by a girl at school, needs someone to link to it for Google Page Rank goodness. So here you go.

– Blair said: To say our NHS today is worse than it was in those Tory years, to see Michael Howard – who sat for 10 years in that cabinet as they cut it, starved it of resources, sneered at its values – to see him take the case of someone in pain and use it to run down and denigrate the whole of our NHS, should make any decent, right-thinking person turn away in disgust. I really like that quote. Labour’s made some bloody awful decisions, but the NHS is a success story and they deserve credit for it.

– Q Magazine described the new series of Doctor Who, scheduled to return on 26th March, as “must-see TV for everyone”. It’s almost here!