Les Orchards: "Here, in the OPML Editor, I just tap out a few new outline items and save the outline. This makes me think of a blog less like Important Capsules of Content and more like a gradually unspooling of brain trangles."

Nine years, and I'm still shaking. 

Today it is my birthday, and so I wish to point you to something. Nine years ago, when I was eleven (to the day), a game called Final Fantasy VII was published in Britain.

There are certain points, certain things you do or read or watch that change everything. FF7 was one of those things. One fan online described it like this:

I often think to myself that very few meaningful things are said about computer games, considering the impact they've had on the world around us (which is enormous). Instead, we get meaningless chatter about graphics technology. To quote one article on IGN: "the HDR lighting, real-time soft shadows, high poly counts, specular and normal mapping, etc, and the 3D occlusion sound allowing you to track enemies are combined with new and established gameplay feeaturs to make the game "next gen.""

Sales patter, puffery and subservient journalism. Where's the passion? Where's the "I spent three years of my life playing this game and it changed me utterly"? Where is the "I think about the story and it makes my teeth jitter and the hair on the back of my neck stand on end"?

Game manufacturers, and hardware manufacturers, vie to make the "most immersive experience", the most lifelike game imaginable. All the while, people get immersed with the characters depicted by words on a page. They suspend their disbelief and watch movies, go to the theatre and read novels.

I don't care about pixel pipelines. I don't care about 3D graphics. I don't care about ultra-realistic simulations of being in a combat squadron killing brown people where you can smell the blood and burning rubber. We've got enough of that going on in real life.

When novels became popular, people warned against women reading them, lest they get ideas above their stations. When rock music became popular, television cut Elvis off at the waist, lest the nation's youth see his jittering crotch and hips. They then set up courtrooms where Tipper, wife of Al, Gore and her merry band of Washington Wives got the full treatment from Frank Zappa (my favourite quote being "May your shit come to life and kiss you on the face", followed by "I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?"). The Parents' Music Resource Center won that fight and, in spite of silly stickers on records, rock music is considered an art form.

A few years later, video games had their growing pains. The United States has the Electronic Software Ratings Board (the ESRB). Britain had the Electronic Leisure Software Publishers Assocation (ELSPA), the ridiculously outmoded British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) and now the Europe-wide Pan European Game Information system evaluated by the Netherlands Institute for the Classification of Audiovisual Media (NICAM).

Just imagine if books had a Pan-European Book Classification with age-appropriate labels on the covers. Or art galleries had age-ratings and "May contain violence and sexual material" labels everywhere. If you can see the ridiculousness of this, you should be able to see why video games aren't currently an art but should try and become one.

When we think about computer and video games, we need to talk about electrifying experiences, as we do with music and film. Final Fantasy VII taught me, at age twelve or thirteen, what this art form could be. Even now it still sends shivers up my spine. That's something FIFA 2007 can never do, regardless of how many NURBS and polygons it has or how "next-gen" it is. All that is a bit like discussing pens and typewriters instead of discussing the books we write with them.

Fundamental deficiency 

I know fundies are pretty dumb, but their stupidity always astounds me. Check out this profound misunderstanding of existentialism over at leaderu.com. One of the points of this article is that "humanistic existentialism" is causing huge ethcial problems in today's world.

Yes, because it's Nietzsche's fanboys who are running the world, not religious zealots. I mean, didn't you all hear that when George Bush took office, he demanded that Karl Rove fill the White House library with full copies of the works of Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus and lots of berets and cigarettes.

But, it actually claims that elite universities are somehow teaching existentialism as a normative ethical system to vulnerable, erm, undergrads at places like Harvard.

Fact-check, dearies. Google existentialism site:harvard.edu and you get 126 results. Substitute theology for existentialism and you get 23,400. christianity gets 50,600. Sartre gets 209, while New Testament gets 11,900.

Okay, let's try Yale. Existentialism garners us 95 pages, theology gets 17,900. Sartre gets 118 results, Jesus 28,000.

If you go to Google Scholar, you'll find that Christianity gives you 303,000 results while existentialism gives you 17,900.

If you Google for site:.edu, Christianity will pull up 2.2m results (admittedly, quite high on the list is an essay by Thomas Huxley), and existentialism a mere 165k. In site:.ac.uk, Christianity gives you 235k while existentialism gives you 17.6k (the third result being Southampton University's Christian Union).

If the world truly is going to hell in a handbag, and higher education has anything to do with it, then surely, by dint of the numbers, it's the theology and Biblical studies departments that are doing it, not "Intro to Existentialism".

The other big bogey man for fundamentalists, Charles Darwin, gets only 37,500 results. Again, compared to 303,000 for Christianity, that's nothing. Yet, it's Darwin who's wreaking moral havoc with unsuspecting students minds? Pull the other one, fundie!