The most retarded “controversy” in videogaming history took an even stupider turn today when Hilary Clinton stepped in to demand the US FTC launch an investigation into who put “explicit material” in the game.

The game being GTA: San Andreas, a game which involves no small amount of shooting pedestrians, carjacking, running people over, beating up prostitutes, mugging people and all manner of other unsavoury activity. It’s not a terribly pleasant game and, yes, I’d be uncomfortable with children playing it. But apparently that’s all by the by because some hacker has managed to mod the game so that you get to see people having sex, and apparently it’s now much, much worse to see two badly rendered polygonal characters having poorly animated sex (mostly fully clothed and, in the girls case, lacking in nipples) than to allow people to gun down policemen, steal their car and run over pedestrians.

sigh. Sometimes I really do wonder if democracy really is such a good idea or if an intellectual meritocracy might be a better way of doing things.

There’s been a bit of a debate over on the tavern recently about highly “feminised” (I’m not keen on that term but we’ll let it slide for the moment) worship – that is, worship of the highly intimate, “Deep love” variety (as one writer put it, the “Jesus is my boyfriend” school of songwriting) and I’m a bit curious about all this.

Now, I have my own complaints about worship music, but they’re mostly because it all tends to fall into the Three Chords And A Capo Sha-la-la-la Oooh Jesus *clap*clap*clap* camp (and also because it’s all pitched for basses and I’m a tenor, but that’s another issue). There’s no arguing that an awful lot of modern worship is, bluntly, nonsense – happy choruses designed as much to make to congregation feel better about singing them as they are to glorify God – but that doesn’t mean there aren’t good modern worship songs, and it would be frankly remarkable if worship song writing had died with the decline in popularity of the pipe organ in contemporary music; it’s just that there’s so much more of it now that it’s hard to sort the wheat from the chaff (much like, say, games for the PS2 – the fact there’s a lot of crap doesn’t mean things like Ico and Disgaea aren’t works of utter genius).

But the intimacy thing has got me thinking, and I’m interested in hearing some thoughts: Where does this idea of an “intimate” relationship with God come from? Where are we instructed to approach God in the same way we’d approach a human lover, except (to paraphrase that great philosopher, Homer Simpson) “replacing Baby with Jesus”? The wonderful Lark News ran a story about this a couple of years back. Satire aside, though, I guess the concern is that it’s using the same language to talk about divine love in the same way we’d talk about human or erotic love, and that at best, that feels weird and inappropriate and, at worst, downright blasphemous.

But I’m trying to understand this one, so, what are people’s thoughts? Where does this idea of intimacy in worship come from, and is it a good and/or healthy thing?

Wow. I might have continued with my MPhil if the research papers I had to read had all been like that.

ajb came across an interesting C++ quirk at work today that I think is worth making a note of:

include <iostream>

class Base
{
public:
  virtual void Hello()
  {
    std::cout << "Base::Hello - Hello World!" << std::endl;
  }
};

class Derived : public Base
{
public:
  virtual void Hello()
  {
    std::cout << "Derived::Hello - Hello World!" << std::endl;
  }
};

int main(void)
{
  Base b;
  Derived d;

  Base &bRef = b;
  Derived &dRef = d;

  bRef.Hello();
  dRef.Hello();

  bRef = dRef; // What’s going on here, then?

  bRef.Hello();

  return 0;
}

This works as you’d expect right up until that bRef = dRef line. This is where things get a little weird. We’ve assigned bRef (which is a reference to b) to dRef (which is a reference to d), so when we call bRef.Hello() we should get dRef’s (ie, d’s) Hello(), right?

Well, wrong. We get b’s Hello(). Which is kind of confusing if you’re used to thinking of references as a sort of “pointers without the *s” like many people do.

A reference to a variable is simple another name for that variable. If we declare bRef to be a reference to b, for all intents and purposes, bRef is b. Operations on bRef take place in exactly the same way as they do on b.

So therefore, what’s happening on our bRef = dRef line? Well, the compiler sees bRef and goes “Ah, that’s another name for b”; then it sees dRef and goes “Ah, that’s another name for d”. So what we’re actually doing is b = d – all the members of d get copied into the corresponding members of b, but – and this is the critical bit – b, and hence bRef, is still the same object as it was before; it does not magically become a Derived object. All we’re doing is a copy assignment.

The effect can be better seen if you add a member variable to Base, and initialise it to one thing in Base’s constructor, and something else in Derived’s constructor. You’ll see that, after the bRef = dRef assignment, that member will equal whatever it was set to in Derived’s constructor – copy assignment has taken place, but bRef is still a reference to b.

I bought a bass before I came to University, figuring if I couldn’t find a band that needed a bass player in Manchester, I should just give up on the whole idea.

Eight years later, it looks like I’m finally in a band. Go me.

(one of the guys I did the Redeeming The Arts recordings with approached me and asked if I was interested in a serious band project he was putting together, and I said hell yes, and so starting soon I shall be devoting one evening a week to ROCKING OUT in Altrincham. Yay, indeed)

Ah well:

Completely uninspired right now. Talk amongst yourselves for a bit.

I’ve been trying to avoid seeing a PSP, because I knew the minute I saw one, I’d want one. As I was walking out of Game (Bomberman DS! Woot!) I got assaulted by a pimply faced young fellow enquiring if I was interested in the PSP. Before I could scream “Noooooooo!” and run away like a big girly girl he thrust the device into my hands and said “Here, have a play”.

Goddamnit.

Somebody please hide my credit card from me. Please.

I would love you to explain to me, very simply, how everyone having ID cards could have prevented this. Thanks.