I AM THE EMPEROR'S WILL MADE MANIFEST

Thank you, community manager.
Truly am I safe with you guarding my sensitive eyes.

Scrambled eggs and whiskey
in the false-dawn light. Chicago,
a sweet town, bleak, God knows,
but sweet. Sometimes. And
weren't we fine tonight?
When Hank set up that limping
treble roll behind me
my horn just growled and I
thought my heart would burst.
And Brad M. pressing with the
soft stick and Joe-Anne
singing low. Here we are now
in the White Tower, leaning
on one another, too tired
to go home. But don't say a word,
don't tell a soul, they wouldn't
understand, they couldn't, never
in a million years, how fine,
how magnificent we were
in that old club tonight.

THANK THE MOTHERFUCK CHRIST THIS WAS BEHIND A WARNING.

"Bruce Wayne organized sentiment like Gotham organized crime; poorly and with campy dramatics."

Oh it's going to be one of those blogs I can tell.
Where we just say weird, vague shit and sit back and think about how fucking clever we are?
You know, exactly like how interesting writing doesn't work?

Empathy is a Disease for the Weak

Yeah.
Thank you, Warhammer.
Little too edgy, though.
I feel like if it were a real Warhammer quote it'd be something even shorter. Maybe a direct 1:1?
"Empathy is weakness."
Disease implies external invaders, which while a major problem for humanity in the Warhammer universe, by far man's greatest threat is man himself.
It's the attention to detail like this while missing the huge, glaring plotholes that makes Warhammer so great.

You Fit Into Me, by Margaret Atwood

Let me summarize Margaret Atwood and her writing for you people:
"slap my naughty ass," said the empowered feminist.
For a woman ostensibly about the empowerment of women her writing sure comes across like she wants a man to tell her what to do.
And I'm sure a lot of people will argue "oh well just because she didn't outright tell you the moral doesn't mean she thinks the opposite" and that's true. Believe me I'm the number one guy to argue against dumbing it down for your audience and leaving the moral unstated and requiring a deeper reading but she takes an almost childlike glee in describing the subjugation of women in some of her shit.
You know like in a Warhammer book when Aaron Dembski-Bowden is describing the Butcher's Nails stabbed into the meat of Angron's brain and you can tell he's quite pleased with the idea and image he just created?
Combine that with sex and I don't think it's a recipe for a serious criticism.
Maybe she doesn't. You know, maybe that's just me and my evil male mind reading too much into it but I don't think so.

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

You fit into me (sexual overtone)
like a hook (masochistic imagery)
DO YOU PEOPLE SEE
WHAT I MEAN
God.
Want to see a genuinely good poem?
You won't find one here.
Here let me show you one:

The solitary goose does not drink or eat,
It flies about and calls, missing the flock.
No-one now remembers this one shadow,
They've lost each other in the myriad layers of cloud.
It looks into the distance: seems to see,
It's so distressed, it thinks that it can hear.
Unconsciously, the wild ducks start to call,
Cries of birds are everywhere confused.

Poems are supposed to be high impact, man.
They're also supposed to be subtle
or something
I dunno.
My favorite poem is a haiku actually because it tells an entire story and doesn't need a bunch of stupid words

    The world of dew --
    A world of dew it is indeed,
    And yet, and yet . . .

He wrote this when his baby daughter died.
See everything was supposed to be all dewy and new and happy and then his kid dies--
you get all the tragedy with none of the melodrama. One background detail and 15 words conveys the entire plot.

A Secret Garden gen fic, featuring Susan Sowerby and Lilias Craven's first meeting.

NO ONE CARES.

one major disadvantage of having such a small apartment...

So speaking of small apartment.
Real talk.
In May I'm moving to South Korea.
I'll keep doing this blog but be prepared for a brief hiatus.
Yes that's right.
I'm going to Changwon.
5 minutes from the beach.
Entire country has fiber optic internet.
Land of Girls' Generation.
I think it's going to be pretty cool.

I read a great many books last year, which I was unable to post about then and am not going to bother trying to get together now. Mostly fiction re-reads of stuff I have around the place. Literary comfort food.

I wasn't going to bother keeing track for 50bookchallenge this year, but what the heck.



"The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Ghenghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege." etc

Woooow and people call my rosy view of Caesar historical whitewashing. This is a man who indirectly (or directly) killed 33% of the entire world.

Well, that's kind of a sweeping statement. Khan abolished torture, except under specific circumstances, more like (for example, if you rejected his overtures of alliance aka gonna conquer you if you don't say yes, then all bets were off; and if you betrayed him? HOSHIT!). I did like the mail system he set up, similar but more effective than our Pony Express.

But much of the Mongol's success depended on continuing to conquer and loot new lands. They didn't make anything much of their own, just provided the system for which trade passed through; and they didn't change the cultures they conquered that much, not among the common folk. That's why their empire started slowly collapsing after Genghis Khan's death, despite his heirs being mostly capable enough.

One of the first recorded examples of biological warfare (flinging plague corpses in catapults over city walls)
But, you know, great guy otherwise.
If his empire stood the test of time like Rome I'd understand the hard on for the guy but he was an excellent executioner and that's about it.
He didn't possess the flare for statecraft like Caesar, Philip II, Xerxes I, Cao Cao, etc etc.

I didn't realize just how political it is that contemporary Mongolians identity with him, and see him as the father figure of their people. The Russian and Chinese governments in particular did everything they could to suppress any nationalist movement, and to keep any written historical documentation from being gathered. But Mongolian scholars and scholars from other nations perservered, despite being at times jailed or even killed for it, and have preserved some of this history regardless.  The author of this book actually spent a year following various maps and trails, camping along where the Mongols traveled, tracing the steps of Genghis Khan with the help of some Mongolian guides and fellow researchers, so he'd better understand some of the conditions that the people lived in. I think that would make a good book, in and of itself.

I found the book extremely interesting to read, the kind that makes me want to go through the bibliography and look up more titles. It's too complex to sum up adequately here, but if you like that kind of history, check it out.

I personally think Genghis was a pretty cool dude but this is hardly the stance a social justice, twitter, fanfic fairy should be taking.
Maybe it's because Genghis is not a white man and therefore the social justice fairies are ok with him because he's diverse but he pretty much only murdered other diverse populations if you catch my meaning so I don't really think--
Also yeah, he moved faster than Rome.
That's because Rome built shit in the places they conquered.
They didn't just maraud across the entire known world and stop when they hit the end of it.

They've been wrong for most of the year, but I couldn't do anything about it, even if I'd known what to do. I went to visit my family in September (annual car inspection, my dad pays the insurance and it's registered in NC), and forgot to mention it to my brother when he was working on my computer. so my posts are probably disappearing into your several days' old history.


I wonder if there's a way to fix the problem without having to take my computer somewhere and paying a lot for it?

I knew you were from NC based on the mention of sweet tea and numerous posts about BBQ.
I should have guessed.
Also: good Christ, you can't set your computer's internal clock?
How did you manage to get this far on the internet without killing yourself?

It is. It came with windows, and I think I got it back around 2006. I've tried udating the version, but can't get it to download for whatever reason; or if it downloads somewhere, i can't find it. 

Click on the clock you dipshit.
Click it and there's a calendar.
Then there's a big CHANGE DATE AND TIME SETTINGS.
Assuming it's Vista or XP. If not, right click and "change time".
This isn't rocket science.
Like there are basic, basic skills about a computer that are harder.

If you right-click your mouse on the time in the lower right hand corner, you should get an option to adjust date/time. Click on that and it will allow you to fix your clock and your date. Of course, you need to know the correct day/date and time to do it, but...

Good luck!

Anna

Anna, the only one with any goddamn sense.

if you are looking at a site and up pops a message that it's illegal...

I have been to some shady ass websites and that has literally never happened to me.
Are you sure you should be trusted with a computer?

and your computer activity is being monitored, etc, how likely is it that action will be taken? I was looking up a term I'd run across and ended up on a site that was kinky videos and got that message just a little bit ago. I immediately got off there, but now I'm worried. I've never come across that kind of warning before. I feel like I should throw away my computer and move somewhere else now.

Oh yeah that was my prepared excuse through all of high school, too.
I WAS JUST DOING SOME RESEARCH FOR A CLASS AND WHAT ARE ALL THESE NAKED ASIAN GIRLS SUDDENLY?
CAN'T TRUST ANY .EDU ANYMORE!
I can't even tell you what a collective shudder of horror the young perverts of the internet let out when Firefox announced its auto-form fill out feature.

Somehow, my printer went off-line. I couldn't get it back, so I deleted it (I think, at least it SAID "delete") and inserted the disc that should upload the program again.

I get the first page where it gives the options, you click on "accept" for the terms, and it's supposed to let you pick "Next" or "Cancel". But it won't let me put check marks on the different options or light up  "Next", if that's clear.

I hit ctrl/alt/del to check and it says the program is running, but it's only supposed to take 3-8 minutes.


I'm trying to get my printer working again because I need to print off a form from a lawyer and mail it in. This is very frustrating. D:

...
What?
This reminds me today of trying to help this girl define a word for her English class next period.
YF-ISM is what she said.
"I'm a licensed English teacher and I've never heard those sounds in combination before."
"This is AP English," she corrected.
"Yeah I understand that. I took that, too, and while I agree it's possible I don't know the term I think it's more likely you're not saying it right."
After three minutes of confused repeating the word it dawned on me.
"Did you mean euphemism?"
"HEY YEAH."
Jesus.
You don't even want to know what round II had in store. All you need to know is it was bigger, dumber and longer and the word was "aphorism".
MAYBE STUDY A LITTLE.
Also having to explain aphorism was a nightmare.
"It's a terse, witty statement that expresses some kind of truth."
"What does terse mean"
"short"
"short witty?"
"short and smart."
"How does one go?"
"Time flies."
"I don't get it."
FUUUUUCK.
Like you're trying so I'm not angry because you have 100% more going on than most kids your age because you're making an effort but come the fuck on this is AP English 12.
Anyway time for bed.
Peace out.

Song of the now.