Endymion Mallorn

An announcement

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 20:24:48 GMT

I HATE SNOW.

At least, when I have to shovel it.

That is all.

A thought

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:07:16 GMT

I have been re-reading Lem's Solaris of late, and came to Kelvin's theory of an imperfect deity. And I realized something that seems oddly profound for me.

Science is the search for questions. Religion is the search for answers.

I tend to err on the side of questioning, but that's me, right?

I'm whispering, "No."

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:05:39 GMT

I just tried to watch the Watchmen movie. I've been told that I should see it before now. I figured that since I do honestly love the book, and the way it ushered in a more deconstructionist age of superheroes, that I should.

However, this wasn't deconstruction - of anything but humans. And I mean directly. I stopped watching during the prison break, during the screaming. I don't watch movies, ESPECIALLY superhero movies, for blood and gore. I watch them for cohesive plots. I don't watch movies, ESPECIALLY superhero movies, for nudity - I have real porn for that, thanks. Superhero films are supposed to be about family-oriented entertainment. Michael Keaton's 1989 Batman proved that "dark" doesn't have to mean full of bloody murder. The recent Christian Bale entries - the same.

I agree with Alan Moore. The movie is shit. Period.

First, the opening was all wrong - Eddie Blake wasn't killed in a fight. He didn't get beaten up. Adrian walked in, punched Eddie, chucked him out a window. Boom. Done. That's the point.

I don't like blood, gore, and nudity. I refused to watch it, so I probably missed visual details. Not that I feel there can be any - blood's blood. And it doesn't belong in movies. Period.

I don't like the fact that I held my hand over the screen every time John came onscreen below the waist. It doesn't belong.

There was exactly one - ONE important nude scene in the movie, and that was a sick joke. Dan Dreiberg, Nite Owl II, stands in front of his suit (that he hadn't worn in 8 years), the same way that Bruce Wayne did in Dark Knight Returns. It would have been more pointed if he'd had a mustache previous. So, let's see...the visuals were gross, the effects shots were okay, and there's too much nudity.

And people wonder why I stopped watching big-name movies. AvP: Requiem was gross, disappointing, and broke too many taboos. Watchmen, I'm actively pissed off about and understand exactly where Alan Moore was coming from. Fans of the movie, and fans of the book, should have no commonalities whatsoever.

Oh. And I have other nitpicks about the opening, but eh.
Only good music in it?
"The times, they are a-changin'"
"99 Luftballons"
"The Sound of Silence."

I absolutely hated the version of Hallelujah they used for the fucking scene, that should have been cut anyway. There's one good version of that, and it's by Rufus Wainwright, and it's in Shrek. Period.

Probably not going to post here for a while

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:59:56 GMT

I have a daily blog project, and no I'm not giving out the URL here. If you really want to know, PM me. I haven't posted outside of BRPS and Fanfic Rants for a while. Probably going to stay that way. And just for the info of those that don't care, even if I was getting "professional help", I'd never say it here.

What Color Is Your Love?

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 19:19:43 GMT

Your Love is Purple

When you love someone, their life becomes your life. And you want to help them be the best person possible.
You are a natural visionary, and you tend to be the teacher in your romantic relationships. You have a lot of wisdom to impart.

You are inspiring and powerful. Many people look up to you, and you often fall in love with those who admire you.
It's hard for you to find someone who's your equal. And to be honest, you enjoy having a bit of a power imbalance in your relationships.

What Color Is Your Love?

Writer's Block: On the Road

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:30:15 GMT

What's on your perfect playlist for a cross-country road trip?

View 508 Answers

A whole lot of music, that's for sure. But it's got to include at least Qntal IV: Ozymandias, Qntal V: Silver Swan, and Qntal VI: Translucida. Has to.

It would be nice to have at least some of Rihanna's music.

Blackmore's Night and Loreena McKennitt would be right after Qntal.

I think I'm clear

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:20:45 GMT

Life is getting on track - slowly but surely. I have a gal who's going to be in touch with me as soon as she gets back from vacation - from Tunisia. Yes, I'm going to be involved with a girl from Tatooine.

She's someone I've known for a while, since Banyan School. How appropriate, the place that was the undoing of the last relationship is the place that starts me on the next path.

HTML: An Introduction

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:59:55 GMT

Well, I had a small problem, but I covered my rump a lot faster than I expected I ever would. Taught 'em about...twice as much as I'd expected. Not a problem, next week I know what I'm teaching and I'll dismiss early if I have to.

Everyone in the class said I was "very patient" - a direct quote, might I add!

And this after my folks warning me not to be "condescending". I mean, the one guy in class seems a little behind the curve, but I make up for it by simply typing it while I'm explaining what I'm doing.

Taught 'em about a few tags and a very few attributes.

Next week's focus: the font tag. Everything else will just sort of flow. I hope to get talking about $lt;img> after that.

Life sucks.

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:25:40 GMT

That is all. It really does though, sometimes.

Just a thought

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:50:41 GMT

Most people I know don't think of New Jersey as a place for heartbreaker summer sunsets, but man do we have 'em sometimes. If you're here near me, in north Jersey, I hope you were looking to the west not that long ago.

Clouds looked like they were on fire.

Updates and thoughts

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:21:40 GMT

First an update. I have the IBM "on-line", though quasi-functional. There are problems, some of which cannot be fixed, and will not be fixed. This is a temporary measure anyway, when I have the money, the Toshiba and I will be reunited.

Second. I have been, for those of you who do not know, reading the Neon Genesis Evangelion manga. And I have had some, well, strange thoughts. I refuse to outline them here, but you can get a guess from the fact that I'm shaken by them.

A warning

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:38:50 GMT

My laptop, I believe, is very near to death. I have the IBM Thinkpad T42 ready and waiting, all that needs to happen is:

The 40GB internal already inside it needs to be backed up .

Then the 320GB that I bought needs to be installed into it.

After that, restore from that backup.

Once I'm sure that that machine is working, I'll need to back up this one and then restore from it.

Issue that came up in my head

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:31:06 GMT

Dear, I'm not sure how many times I've said it, but I'm going to say it again. I do not like asking a question, or saying that there's something we need to discuss, and being dismissed. And yes, that is exactly what it feels like when you do not answer. I constantly feel like the silence on the phone is simply an attempt to make me go away, because that makes the question go away.

In most situations, I'd say that that's something you need to work on. At this moment, I'm not going to be as nice as I would be in most situations. That shit has got to go, and it's got to go before I can move in with you and be confident about doing so. More than any other single behavior of yours that gets on my nerves, the silence, and simple unwillingness to answer when questions are put to you, pisses me off no end.

I do not know where this started with you. If you'd like to discuss it, I am here. I am, as always, willing to listen. The problem though, is that you haven't been willing to talk. I wish I could get you to open up about things, but every time it feels like there's some progress made, it's one step forward in one area, and another back about something else. I have been trying to control my temper when it regards that, which is part of why I'll just sit there with the phone in silence, when I'm waiting for you to answer. It is easier for me to simply wait, in silence, and not lose it than if I were to say anything.

I love you. And I am still here.

Dante's Inferno Test

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:39:37 GMT

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Fifth Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Very Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Very High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very High
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Extreme
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Extreme
Level 7 (Violent)	Very High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Extreme
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Very High

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

Laptop

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:07:34 GMT

It's in the shop. Fuckers said it could take up to "two days". Whatever the fuck THAT means.

What the hell, women?!

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:52:06 GMT

For those that aren't aware, I work at the public library. Usually it's just a steady job, kinda boring, with nothing exactly standing out. However, lately I have been working with our periodicals collection - that is, magazines and newspapers. What I'm doing right now, for instance, is discards.

And I have seen something. Men's magazines, for the most part, try not to advertise so loudly what they're about. Sure, Playboy and Penthouse are pretty freakin' obvious. But still. I'm going through stacks of Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and even two of the bridal mags. All of them, either every month, or every other month, feature some kind of "sex tips" on the cover! I mean, in addition to the Barbification of women, the unrealistic and unnecessary limits we place on the concept of beauty...

What the hell, women?!

These things are sold in the same place as newspapers and the Weekly World News, for cryin' out loud! Every one is constantly screaming sex this, beauty that. I get the feeling I know why so many women are insecure with themselves, it's their chosen reading material! Sure, you won't see a 300-lb gal with a harelip in Playboy, Maxim, Stuff, or Penthouse (none of which I look at more than once a year, just for the record). But hell, some of the gals I've seen in there look a lot worse than the things born as women that grace the covers of Vanity Fair.

What in the world can anyone be thinking when they look at one of those mags?

School

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:23:01 GMT

Do I have to mention just how much I hate this place? Well, all I can say is that I'm glad that I'm almost done. I'm going to be going over to the SSD office today for my form - and I'm going to print out and fill out my Major Audit within the week. Maybe not today, but meh.

Snow!

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:36:29 GMT

The library closed / is closing at 3PM EST today. I'll try to be on at home.

Progress!

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:35:04 GMT

It may not seem like much, but in addition to 6 bottles (2-liter), and 1 more that I realized I missed...
I cleared about 3 feet of space in my room near the door. In doing so, I found:
over a dollar in change,
a plethora of pens, pencils, and markers
A bunch of books,
and most of a paper bag's worth of garbage.

Still no sign of the 128MB flash drive though.

An actual life update.

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 01:12:38 GMT

I have another 4-class semester, so let's just go over this:

GNED-303 - 1, 2-page paper due Friday before 8:30AM. 1ish pages done. No biggie.
GNED-303 - 1, 5-page paper due NEXT Friday at 8:30 on the "coffee crisis". Not a damn thing done.

ENGL-200 - 1 5-7-page essay on Jane Eyre (hopefully on why I hate it so much) due the 29th. Nothing done, might fail it and thus fail the course.

MATH-106. Nothing soon.

ENGL-234. Nothing soon

Something I've been thinking about.

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:17:59 GMT

Well, because of these crazy jerkoff English profs, I've been thinking about philosophy, and the way people view the world. And I've basically come to a realization. There are three kinds of people in the world, that's it. Now, within each kind, there are plenty of smaller divisions, 'cause people like to be unique. But essentially, here are the three spheres of human perception:

Pre-Modern: Paradoxically, this is what many of the ancient Greeks were. Any time you hear talk of a "Golden Age", that's a pre-modernist coming out of the woodwork. What I mean is, these are the kind of people who think of their generation or time period as a "fallen" one and the past as higher. Therefore, goodness/rightness is compared first to how similar to the actions of the past it is.

Modern: Carpe diem, baby! This group generally represents people who stick to the status quo. As a group, really they're the one with the greatest diaspora, because the status quo for, say, someone living 10 miles out of NYC isn't the same as that of someone in Alaska.

Post-Modern: Where modernism has the greatest diaspora, this is the group who argue the most. Like the Pre-Modernists, this view holds that we're lower in some fashion (or in all fashions) as well. But instead of looking to the past and "the voice of experience", this viewpoint is a forward-looking one. They may not actively fight to change the status quo, but at some level they look to future developments to "save" them.

These perceptive categories have nothing to do with social class - though you might find that the Superfluous Man of the 19th Century would be most likely to occur in post-modernism, simply because of the kind of figure he is. And frankly, much of country music is directly related to pre-modernism - Toby Keith's "Should Have Been a Cowboy" or, oh, 90% of the Dixie Chicks' Fly and Wide Open Spaces albums.

Manda's new blog

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:37:27 GMT

My wife has started a new blog here: http://www.mysticalworlds.org/RescueRant/

It's got potential. A lot of it.

The Pursuits of English

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:21:06 GMT

To You All

Your pursuit of English is as vapid as you are, with no substance, merely taken up by an ever-shrinking form. Your "criticism" is a perfect example of this, with the concept of taking what should be your honest feeling about something and turning it into a formulated set of buzzwords. The mere existance of the concepts giving birth to the Marxist criticism or the Feminist criticism should have told you a long time ago that something was drastically rotten in the state of literature. I'm aware that you don't understand what I'm talking about, since you have long since lost your own substance to the form that you chose to take on as "Professors of English".

I suggest a new "criticism". I propose that a poem's rhyme and meter mean nothing. What means anything is how it makes you feel. I suggest that a new criticism be found to point out what most of the canon is - dry, old, shit. That this "new criticism" would call a spade a spade without being afraid of stubbing its toe on one. Not all old work is useless, granted, but most of it is. Our existance is fundamentally diffeent than that of te early 1900s. Therefore, so too should our literature.

But you don't get it, do you? You're going to fail me, and I am...underwhelmed.

Writer's Block: Six-Word Story

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:52:39 GMT

Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. His response? “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” He is believed to have called it his greatest literary work ever. Can you write a story in six words?

Submitted By femspectre

View 506 Answers

Life for sale, please enquire within.

Just to reiterate..

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 14:15:32 GMT

SHE SAID YES