Hitherby Dragons

Found on silenceleigh's LJ, a reference to an ongoing...something...called Hitherby Dragons:

Not that," I said. "That's a stupid kind of Hell."

"Oh?" it asked. "What is Hell, then?"

"It's not torture," I said. "Pain is just sensation. I mean, humans are really good at this kind of thing, and demons are even better, and I'm sure that you can always make torture last one day longer and make it one note harder to bear. But pain is just sensation. Torture is just sensation. It's not suffering until it makes you suffer. And Hell is eternal suffering."

"What is suffering?"

"Suffering is when you can't accept the pain," I said. "And it's normally self-limiting, because people automatically accept the pain they're used to. Most humans are so used to walking around at the bottom of an atmosphere that we forget how much it hurts. And we're so used to not having our jaws ripped off every few days that we forget how nice and amazingly cool that never happening is. But sometimes you can't accept the pain. You want to fly. You want to transcend. You want an apple and you can't have one. You want the pain to stop. You want something. You want something that's right, and proper, and something that you can't have. And that's suffering."

"So what is Hell?"

"A place where there's something you can't let go of," I said. "It's a place where there's something so bad that you can't accept it. Where there's something you don't have that's strong enough to cling to forever and ever. It's a place where you can't just close your eyes and let go of the pain and the fear. It's a place where there's something you can't stop wanting."

I don't know how representative the quote is, but I suspect that if it is, at least a couple of my friends will find significance there.

oh, yeah, take it from US. Conserve.

from Robin at ambiguous.org:

The Chinese Miracle Will End Soon

Planet Faces Nightmare Forecasts as Chinese Consumption Grows and Grows

...and this is part of the reason why the US' refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol is insanely stupid: without a public committment on the part of the US government to believable conservation and pollution controls, no one else is going to take anything that the US has to say on this point seriously.

We're running out of the geopolitical equivalent of social capital at a frightening rate, folks.

the Dissociated Press meets LJ

from darcydodo:

LJ Markov Random Text Generator

Two of my particular favorites, especially the last quasi-sentence:

mercenary gouging misleading jerks. (2) "Awareness bracelets" (or ribbons--which reminds me of a presentation & demonstration. Somehow this doesn't feel very "3D" to me--it's still very tied to the Gentleman at the bottom of an atmosphere that we can't really sleep while he does this for a couple of hours starting at 2:30 AM. What's worse is that life isn't a story, however great the need to perceive it as one. And one of life's chiefest failings, from a storytelling perspective, is that neither attention or cuddling, per se, seems to slowly be figuring out that fingers don't actually have

and

them; he'll still suck on one for a while, but not for long. So we're trying him out on a pacifier. For me, it's hard not to think of this as some kind of Hell." "Oh?" it asked. "What is suffering?" "Suffering is when you can't have one. You want the pain to stop. You want to transcend. You want an apple and you can't have one. You want an apple and you can't accept it. Where there's something you can't accept it. Where there's something you don't have that's strong enough to cling to forever and ever.

which I think is a scarily appropriate combination.

Go nuts.

Corwin pix updated

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jmadden/corwin

Cuteness R Us.

Batman in CGI Lego

snagged from filkertom:

Batman: New Times

Nicely done. Includes voices by Adam West, Mark Hamill, and Dick Van Dyke, fer cryin' out loud.

interview memeage

Snagged from red_frog, who took it from silenceleigh, who uses it to define new characters that she's thought of, so as to flesh them out and make their motivations clear.

I have the feeling that this is the sort of penetrating interview that is nonetheless going to completely fail to illuminate certain aspects of my life. (Then again, I don't have all day, and it's not like I've really done justice to the questions that are here, never mind the ones that might not be. :> )

( Read more... )

very silly Latin translation

and just in case there's someone here that hasn't seen it before:

Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back" translated into Latin.

Apparently you can get one of the signature phrases on various Cafepress items, too.