My own self

1. d4 d5
2. c4 Nc6
3. Nc3 dxc4
4. Nf3 f6
5. Bf4 g5
6. Bg3 h5
7. e3 Be6
8. Nb5 Rc8
9. b3 h4
10. Bxc7 Rxc7
11. Nxc7+ Qxc7
12. e4 Bg4
13. d5 Bxf3?!
14. Qxf3 Qa5+
15. Kd1 Nd4
16. Qe3 e5
17. Bxc4 Bc5
18. a4 Qb4
19. g3 a6
20. gxh4 Rxh4
21. d6 Bxd6
22. Bxg8 b5
23. h3 Rh8
24. Bd5 Bc5
25. Bb7?? Nxb3
26. Qe2 Nxa1
27. Bxa6 Qxa4+
28. Ke1 Qxa6
29. Kf1 Ke7
30. Kg2 Nb3
31. Rb1 Nd4
32. Qd1 Qa3
33. Ra1 Qxh3+
34. Kg1 Qh1#
0-1


Congratulate Obdormio on his valiant efforts.
(Even though his armies marched first, the imperialist bastard)

Accounts of religion in Benin are vague, but the Bini apparently believed in a supreme god who created and ruled the earth; they considered it useless to worship him, however, since he was already benevolent. Instead, they worshiped numerous lesser gods, who they felt could mediate for them with the supreme god. The human sacrifices were offered not to the gods, but to the devil, whom the Bini blamed for all their misfortunes. Victims rarely struggled; some actually assisted the executioner, and a few even volunteered to be sacrificed - powerful proof of the intensity of their religion.

[...]

After the Europeans arrived, the slave trade mushroomed; farming and commerce were slighted and the economy - inevitably - started to collapse. The Oba [king], believing his bad fortune was the work of the devil, ordered more and more human sacrifices to turn the tide. But by 1897 the disintegration was complete; that year a British force found the city of Benin all but deserted and littered with the bodies of sacrificial victims. After four centuries of greatness, Benin had finally passed into history.

- Basil Davidson
in African Kingdoms, page 112 & 118.

They cancelled Easy Money. I watch TWELVE current TV shows every week, and they cancel the one I deem best of them after only having run for FOUR episodes.






Bloody. Bleeding. Bastard. Hell.

The invention and implementation of the train took all of the adventure out of human culture.



Discuss.

I give you - with great sadness - the Signs of Modern Norway:





The beauty; gone. The charm; gone. The identity; gone. The soul. Gone.


All that remains are traffic signs. Anonymous traffic signs for anonymous traffic with anonymous people with anonymous lives in an increasingly anonymous country.



Damn them all.

Are you the Cow of Pain?!

- Jaye Tyler

Of course, first thing that happens after this is I see the fourth episode on the list and gets hit in the face with there being things that clearly has occurred between it and the one I saw as the third one.

I think that when I'm done with this show I'll make a list of my own, just to add to the confusion! (And to help out those very few who might check out the show based on my B5-pimpage)


A good episode, by the way - so far, two out of four episodes have centred on Galen, both being slightly more engaging than the other two. Melikes.

Fornjót (Old Norse Fornjótr) is an ancient giant in Norse mythology, the father of Kári (a personification of wind), of Logi (a personification of fire), and of Hlér or Ægir (the ruler of the sea) and a king of Finland [. . .] Fornjót is also, following a particular legendary genealogical tradition, the first-known direct paternal ancestor of William I of England

- Wikipedia

Score one for Finland, then! This DOES mean they can claim the crown of England, right? Or at least, seeing as there's no Finnish royal family anymore, vice versa? (Let's be honest, it's Finland, this would both be steps up)

Amusingly, this makes Elizabeth the second part giant. More amusingly still, it makes her part Finnish.



Edit: Interestingly enough, a genealogy on the bottom of the page also shows Fornjót and the vanir god Njord as being the ancestors of the Swedish House of Yngling as well as the famous "first" Norwegian "historical" king, Harald Fairhair. Sheesh. Those giants certainly got around.

...be very afraid.

They sold volume 1 of "Y the Last Man", "Fables", "Lucifer", "Preacher" and "100 Bullets" for 50 kroners (a little over 8 USD at the current rate) each. Which is a quarter of their regular price in Norway. You can almost hear the people behind the counter wheezing "First one's free..." behind your back.

And yes, I bought them all. Only one of them I've read before is "Lucifer", and in its case, it was actually quite the coup, 'cause I'm going to buy the entire Lucifer-series at some point anyway, this got me volume 1 cheaply.

But the other four... all widely recognized as quality-comics, all stuff I've thought I'd one day read... but not priorities I was actually going to buy (more than maybe one of, at some point) any time soon at all.

And the bastards do this to me.

I won't have time to read any of'em for weeks yet. I want to finish "Bone" and the Bone-prequel I picked up earlier this week. I still think I'll end up picking up "The Fountain" next week, and if I do, I'll read that first, too. And there's always books of the non-graphic variety, of which I've got plenty. Oh, and there's, like, 2000 pages of unread curriculum in plastic bags beneath my table, don't tell anyone.

But I've bought them. At some point, I'll read them.



And we all know it. I know it. You know it. The weasels behind the counter, oh, don't they know it. Everybody knows it.


'Cause, seriously, there is no doubt about it at all. There'll simply be no such thing as "stopping at volume 1".



I'm fracked.

All it will take is SIXTY well-placed daggers, and we'll rule Britain! Well, our king will, anyway. Scary part is, it'll only take a handful more daggers to have Ari Behn rule through his daughter by proxy.

Dynasties. Gotta love'm.

Me: "Kvadruppelpost! DAMN, eg liker dette forumet."
SAU: "...fordi du er enehersker og kan gjøre som du vil?"
Me: "Fordi eg er eineherskar og ALLE kan gjere som eg vil."

Quoted by Obdorimo in his MSN subnick.

(Me: "Quadruple posting! DAMN, I like this forum."
SAU: "...because you're its supreme ruler and can do whatever you want?"
Me: "Because I'm its supreme ruler and EVERYBODY can do whatever I want.")

Because if she does, I'm suspecting I'll be one online friend shorter rather soon. :\


Oh, what are the odds of Shakira finding out, anyway? Almost non-existent, right? I mean, it's not like people are linking to the post in question for no apparent reason beyond increasing the probability of some Shakira-loving snitch seeing it, right?


Right?

As soon as I saw his subnicktext, as mentioned in the post posted right before this one, I told Olaf "Yay, more to blog about!" As I was writing the last post, he edited his subnicktext to quoting me with the "Yay, more to blog about!"-quote instead! Of course, that quickly changed, too, (to something not-me-related so bugger that) so it didn't last for long, but a quote is a quote!







Ca-CHING.


You people might think you're smart, but you're forgetting one important thing. Nothing, nothing at all is insignificant or petty enough not to be a potential ego-boost of mine.



Oh, and the Psychophant says hello.



"hello."

For a while now I've been back to "Loke" as my MSN-nick - I dropped the "yule"-part when I went back to school, somehow, for me, Christmas ends when I leave my family again, be it in December or March.

Anywho, I'm currently using the following MSN-subnicktext:
"I stood my ground and I'll fly once more; it's the last oath that I ever swore"

but today I'll change it to "Don't you tell me what I cannot do! Don't you think I have to run from you!"

Both are lines from the rather good fan-made "Mal's song", using the Firefly-theme-song as the chorus. The new one is also somewhat of a nod to the Lost-character John Locke's signature phrase "Don't tell me what I can't do!", seeing as I'm growing increasingly more fond of that character again as I'm getting deeper into season 2. Which, by the way, seems underrated to me, the episode with the button and the countdown was a beautifully displayed mindgame and got me thinking more on self-searching philosophical notions that I thought I had finished with and concluded on ten years ago.


Still flying.

... and the environmental-police will be along shortly to pick it up with great indignation.



Be that as it may, an old message-board-acquaintance of mine, who on his comments here has called himself Sheepslayer, has felt "inspired" by my non-blog to make his own. If imitation is a sincere form of flattery, I am sincerely flattered.


But there can only be one, dude. Game on.

Hooray, new year.


Not.


I actually enjoyed the one we just had. Wouldn't mind it having gone on for a while yet. But noooooo. Nature had to come and be all orderly all over my life. I probably threw something in the wrong recycle-bin this year or something, because it is so obviously out to get me for something.

But. New year, new opportunities, new happy days, and, just maybe, new Whedony-goodness. (Yes. This is like the one day of the year I attempt to be positive. Those dear to me are far too dear for me to allow myself even the slightest thought of something bad happening to them in the coming year. So I'll skip that point totally. In fact, this whole parantheses, you're imagining it. Yes. Yes. It is a fiiigmeeent ooof yoooour iiimaaagiiinaaatiiioon. Sleeeeeeeeep.) And also - Are you SLEEPING?! In the middle of my New Year's Day-rant?! GET A GRIP, that's not polite, like, at all!

So, in accordance with all clichès, lets recap 2005! Rah-rah, onwards chaps, for the Empire!

2005 began on a somewhat interestingly unoriginal note, with fireworks, the first of January at 00:01. Boom, it said. Fireworks would do that.
Also, there were some sad people all over, due to the weather-thingies in South-East Asia. (Obviously there are people who nature reasonlessly hates even more than me)
Then, school started. I took Asian religion and Extinct Mediterranean, Mesopotamian & Norse Religion at the University. Somewhere, some kid ate a potato without complaining. And the birds sang. My sister had her ninth birthday, and there was much rejoycing. And some melancholy, obviously, she's not supposed to be a little woman of nine, she's supposed to be our cute little baby! After this, we commenced on Easter. Booh-yeah. Once again, we celebrated the death and rebirth of God by placing small yellow cloth-chickens on top of our televisions and tabletops. (Who said religion lead to thinking inside small, limit-imposing boxes?) THEN. Then came May. Oh May you fair and mellow... First of May, Worker's Day. Not that I gave a crap. Eight of May, some kind of gender-fascism went on, I think. Oh! And then, SEVENTEENTH OF MAY. Norway's National Day! It's like the Fourth of July and Christmas all rolled into one, only without the firworks and the pressies. We walk in parades. Like, all normal people. We just do. We line up, and we walk around, waving flags (though there has been some debate as to the colouring of these flags) and generally being nice and cheery.

Lesse. THEN CAME SUMMER. Swooping upon us with its decievingly un-summery weather and temperatures, it took us all by complete surprise when we finally got some time off from tiresome things like work and school. As for me, I did some exams and went back to doing nothing. Yay. For a few weeks. Then I had to work. I do that in summers, if almost nearly never in other times of the year. Silly need of silly money.

But. Nice summer, all-in-all. My youngest brother turned fourteen and stuff. Then came autumn. New subjects. I took three courses; Introduction to European Politics and History, Introduction to Religios Science and Christianity, Islam and Jeudaism. It would turn out I did far better with the stuff I did in spring, but oh, well.
Batman Begins and Serenity in cinemas, which should be enough to give anyone several happies. Oh, and even though it almost completely ruined the saga for me (Palpatine an IDEALIST? Oh-sodding-please!), Revenge of the Sith deserves a mention for being the independently best movie of the Star Wars-saga. Other movies now that I mention the theme, would be A History of Violence, Sin City, probably Narnia once I get around to seeing it, and Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy which by an astonishing turn of events, didn't suck. It wasn't extremely good or anything, apart from the hillarious opening with the Dolphin-song, but it did a helluva lot better than I'd have guessed. And probably some others that I forget.

Then came Christmas, which has been really nice. By then, my mother had turned fify, my father fourty-nine (he's constantly nagging her about her being in her fifties while he's still young), and my other brother eighteen. And myself, I turned twenty-one. Oh, the horrors of adulthood growing increasingly nearer.

2005. Norway has had 100 years with our royal family. I've had twenty-one-years with mine. God, whomever He, She, They or It might be, bless us, everyone.