Chat

[AiA in Atlanta]

Justin Bieber was caught smoking pot. Does anyone really give a shit?

[mellie]

Justin Bieber was caught smoking pot. Does anyone really give a shit?

Nope, I have had enough of Justine Beiber (my eldest daughter thinks he's absolutely wonderful) to do me a lifetime.

My ears bleed when she plays his music.

[IQS.RLOW]

Justin Bieber was caught smoking pot. Does anyone really give a shit?

Pot was mortified and ran off crying

[AiA in Atlanta]

Bieber is almost certainly addicted to pot and will be rotting in hell for eternity. I hope.

[Neferti]

Bieber is almost certainly addicted to pot and will be rotting in hell for eternity. I hope.

He will end up as a GAY front person. What else is there after 12?

[Super Nova]

Want your deadbeat kid to stop playing so many video games? Here's an approach that probably won't work, but could make good fodder for a comedy about adult children living at home.

From China, via internet service provider Livedoor and video gaming blog Kotaku East, comes the tale of a father whose unemployed 23-year-old son was allegedly devoting the bulk of his waking hours to an online war game.

As the son's skills grew, he began to find that he could defeat almost all comers - until one day the young man found himself being cut down immediately every time he began the game.

After a while, he began to suspect that something was up, and grilled his virtual assassins as to why they were targeting him.

Advertisement

Eventually one let slip that he had been hired by the boy's father for just that purpose.

Kotaku East explains: "Unhappy with his son not finding a job, Feng decided to hire players in his son's favourite online games to hunt down Xiao Feng. It is unknown where or how Feng found the in-game assassins - every one of the players he hired were stronger and higher leveled than Xiao Feng.

"Feng's idea was that his son would get bored of playing games if he was killed every time he logged on, and that he would start putting more effort into getting a job."

The plot apparently failed, as Xiao Feng refused to stop playing the game. But if he keeps at it, maybe one day he can get a paid job as an online video game hitman.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/g ... z2HSwqEG8m

I like this story. How desparate must the father be to get his son to get out there and look for a job.

[boxy]

It would take a fair bit of tech-savy... I'm betting that "like father, like son" applies

[Super Nova]

It would take a fair bit of tech-savy... I'm betting that "like father, like son" applies

Good point. The father would have to get on the game... hunt down top gamers.... chat with them (you can do that on these games) then offer the payment for services.

You would at least need to be game savy. You may not need to be too tech savy these days as the game interfaces are really intuative.

[boxy]

I play a couple of online games, and they disallow (for good reason) RL payment for ingame services (like such bountyhunting on another player). I'd be surprised if this wasn't a general rule of gameplay across the board. This means that dad either had to have something to trade "in game" (which takes dedication) or had to know how contact these bountyhuners where the game developers couldn't track their out of character transactions.

Either way... dad is pretty well up on what it takes...

[AiA in Atlanta]

Pike found choked on zander in Netherlands

Anglers are scratching their heads after a pike was found dead with a zander - a fish of similar size - jammed in its mouth in the Netherlands.

Rene Spaargaren, from Almere near Amsterdam, noticed the dead fish locked together in water near his home and dragged them out with a boat hook.

"It was clear that the pike had bitten off more than it could chew - or swallow, rather," he told BBC News.

British angling expert Charles Jardine said the event was "really unusual".

"What on Earth possessed the pike to take on prey that size?" he asked. "Gluttony just killed that fish."

Mr Spaargaren reported his find to the Dutch nature conservation news website Natuurbericht, which published the story and one of his incredible photographs.

'Not a python'
He came across the fish while doing some work by his jetty this week.


The pike was unable to release its catch once it had bitten
Having calculated roughly that the pike measured about 1m (3.2ft) long and the zander about 75cm (2ft 5in), with a combined weight of about 15 kilos (33lb), he threw them back in the water.

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Jardine explained that the zander, sometimes known as the "pike-perch" because of its similarities to the two other species of fish, was an unusual choice of target for a pike.

"A pike is not an alligator or a python - it will not accommodate similar-sized food," he told the BBC.

"Because the teeth on a pike go backward, it would have been unable to release its grip on the zander. It was a death grip for the fish."

Mr Jardine, who champions angling among schoolchildren for the Countryside Alliance Foundation, added: "I have seen Victorian pictures of such things, done with artistic licence, but nobody gave them much credence."

A similar phenomenon was reported in Suffolk, England, in October 2011, when a pike was found dead with a carp in its mouth.