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Like I said, I'm not too bothered about strangers reading about my life.

Ahem...

Hmm, I've sired a vampire, called Jo.

Someone I know under a pseudonym, or another long distance reader that I'll probably never meet?

It's cool. I set this thing up, partly for myself, to get various thoughts written down, and partly for other people, so they could get an insight of who I really am (I'm not great around people).

I never even thought about total strangers reading it. Hey, you're welcome to do so. Read on and enjoy. I find it odd that people out there want to read about my life.

Perhaps they've got a dull job with access to a high speed internet connection. ;-)

The Patented Bush-Era Post-War Headline Generator

Insert name of country: ___________________

Insert name of politician: _____________________


Examples of this amazing new application in operation:

North Korea 'not next', says Straw

Syria 'not next', says Powell

France 'not next', says Bush with a smirk and his fingers crossed

Well, with over a million other blogspots out there, I wouldn't count this as a public forum, more one lost amongst countless thousands of others, so:


http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?biter=Archangelsk

Come and be a vampire.

I've just found out that my mother is Mish and my closest relatives are Fantastic Finger Guy and Giggles.

Eep.

Memo to self - send off that cheque to Tim Eccles for the 'A Private War' campaign for WFRP.

Quick update:

- Tariq Aziz has given himself up to coalition troops, apparently after he failed to negotiate for terms.

- According to Bush, the observer on the ground after the initial 'decapitation' strike at the start of the war says that Saddam was at the very least severely injured. This would mean that all the sightings of him since then were either pre-recorded or doubles. Or faked. If he was capable of appearing behind a desk, they could hide the bandages, wheelchair and whatnot - that's what the Americans did with Roosevelt during World War II. In backwater areas, many Americans didn't even realise that their president was a cripple, thanks to seated photographs and painful braces that held him upright when necessary.

- Slobodan Milosevic and his wife have been charged with murdering a rival, Ivan Stambolic, former president of Serbia. Stambolic was best man at Slobodan and Mirjana's wedding, but they fell out in the late 80s. Apparently, police investigating the Zoran Djindjic assassination managed to find evidence saying where Stambolic's body was.


And me?

I've been rejected by the Creative Writing department, so I'm a month and a half away from being thrown headlong into the real world.

No more student discounts.

No more lying in bed until lectures at 2pm.

No more essays.

No more exams.

No more dissertations.

No more visiting the porters' lodge to pick up mail.

No more computer labs.

No more seminars.

No more lectures.

It's going to be interesting.

At least now I have no pressure to get a 2:1 (which it's now impossible for me to get anyway) and no more restrictions on what I can write. I might not get an MA out of it, but at least I can write whatever I like, no matter how derivative and based in someone else's universe it might be.

On one level I'm scared, but I'm also looking forward to it.

Oh, the deadline's 4pm tomorrow, by the way.

Hmm, been up to campus, talked to the undergraduate secretary and head of department, and they managed to persuade me that even though I'm going to miss the deadline, I should still try and get it done and get the -10% penalty, rather than a fail for just jacking it in.

I asked about resitting the entire year, and they said it couldn't be done.

So, this weekend is going to be me writing a Ling 206 essay and re-reading all my notes for Stylistics. Meet up with Mick on Monday, hopefully (he won't get my email until then because he's on holiday) and get the confidence boost and tips necessary to reel out about 6000 words, again hopefully.

They recommended I take the rest of the day off - I was a bit... overwhelmed, you might say, when I was explaining stuff to them.

Good job I can spend tonight roleplaying.

Still incredibly stressed, but things are vaguely back on track.

Thank fuck I never have to write another fucking essay after these two.


...

Exhale, and relax... :-)

When I'm trying to work, but can't, I find I spend a lot of time pacing the length of my room. Occasionally, I talk to myself, in the 'I can't fucking do this!' kind of a way. I have conversations with the mirror, about how much I suck at English Language.

That's normal, right?

Anyway, the thing is, being able to do that must be a pretty good stress relief, because while I'm at home, without my computer table (left in Lancaster because of lack of space in the car), I've had to pull the desk out from my cabin bed and put my computer on that.

I have a narrow bedroom, and the desk reaches right across to the other wall.

Ergo, I can't even fucking walk the length of the room any more, and I'm forced to sit in front of my monitor screen for about fourteen hours a day, desperately trying to think of some fucking thing to write.

I'm driving up to Lancaster tomorrow, so I'm going to track down the deadline for my dissertation, somehow get an extension for it and then concentrate on my 206 essay over the weekend. Once that's out of the way, there's just the dissertation to deal with.

Or I could just decide to resit the entire year. I'll see what happens if I do that - if I can pick and choose individual modules to resit, and keep the ones I'm pleased with.

LING 204, for example. I got my second best essay grade ever before Christmas, and I'm expecting somewhere in the 60s for the one I handed in before the holiday. Wouldn't want all that to go to waste.

LING 206 could bear a little repeating. Hopefully the lecture times will be a bit less evil (9am, I ask you!) next year.

LING 201, the dissertation module, hell, I'd start that from scratch and do something a bit less ambitious and easier to talk to a tutor about. Mick doesn't seem to know quite what I mean, although it's not his fault, because I don't know what I mean either. Creative Writing? Could repeat that, for fun, but I could live without a resit.

Ever had that feeling that you've been at university for three years, yet not actually learnt anything?

Oh, sod it.

Might as well stop denying it.

Due to my utter lack of motivation, compounded by an initial lack of any ideas about what to do for it, my dissertation is, as of now, officially fucked.

Well, I've still got an essay and two exams to concentrate on. I'll be getting a 2:2, provided I can at least get a bad dissertation handed in. It could be worse.

Sometimes I think it would be so much simpler to drop out, but having resat a year at sixth form so that I could get into Lancaster, I don't think I could live with myself for giving up like that.

And besides, it would mean I'd have wasted nearly three years and thousands of pounds (not just of my own and my parents' money, but the extra thousands that the government pays towards each individual student's university education).

How exactly do I go about resitting a year?

I'm doing three very interesting modules this year. I wouldn't mind going right back to the start and doing them all over again.

I might look into doing that, actually.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy...

"Basically, we took every dollar we made on Half-Life and put it into Half-Life 2." - Gabe Newell, founder and managing director of Valve Software

The Source engine was finalised in September, whereupon Valve "cut everything that wasn't ready, to be used in Half-Life 3". Oh baby, Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 3. [metaphorical embarrassing splurge]

Reflections on characters's eyes, airborne particles of dust glittering in the light, flickering shadows from a blazing room, model location damage, powerlines that sway in the breeze, cut-scenes you can now interact with, bullet holes and sounds depending on the impacted material, a wrench dropped into a machine will tangle in gears, breasts that move beneath clothing when Alyx raises an arm (what?!), proper lip movements from speaking characters, ripply water...

:-D [blissful sigh...]

September 30th, 2003, the dawn of a new era in computer gaming...

Unless of course it gets put back by the developers.

Which would lead to rioting on the streets of Bellevue, WA.

Random quote of the day:
"God gave you a penis and a brain, and only enough blood to run one of them at a time." - Robin Williams

Just downloaded his Broadway show of last year, or the year before. Post-Afghanistan, pre-Iraq, anyway.


----------------------

Heh heh heh...


:: how jedi are you? ::



What Egyptian Deity are you? go to:the quiz!


Now, this one's interesting, but sadly not too far off, perhaps...


Which era in time are you?



Congratulations, you're Dr. Stephen Franklin, doctor of Babylon 5 and protector of the sick, weak, and dying..
Which Babylon 5 Character are you?
Take the Babylon 5 Quizby Paradox.




You are a phoenix.

What legend are you?. Take the Legendary Being Quiz by Paradox

Ha!

Strike To Stun has a great version of the history of Bretonnia, combining both the cool old Bretonnia and the cruddy new Arthurian Bretonnia!

(I'm talking WFRP, by the way.)

Nothing on the BBC News page now. Seems it must have been a false alarm.

Either a hoax, or some fucking retarded idiot who thought he could send flour/sugar/sherbet/dandruff through the US Postal Service.

Potential bio-terror attack at a US mail depot today - breaking news.

Initial tests say it could be plague or botulinium.

But then, initial tests have been saying sarin and mustard gas in Iraq for weeks, and it's not been true.

They never did track down those guys who were sending those anthrax letters, did they?

The Daily Telegraph has reported that George Galloway MP, a long time supporter of Iraq (in his words, the people, in his opponents' terms, Saddam), has received as much as £375,000 a year from the Oil For Food programme, thanks to a dirty deal with Saddam's regime.

A Telegraph journalist, quoted on the BBC site:

I went to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in central Baghdad on Saturday.

For much of the last week, journalists have been running around Baghdad going into government ministries looking for documents of any kind really.

I went into the foreign ministry.

I went up to the first floor of the building with my Iraqi translator.

We looked around. We came to small room that had a large pile of box files, most of them piled on the floor.

We searched through them and I asked my translator to look for any that were labelled with the arabic term for Britain.

We found two box files. We took them away. We looked through the contents, which was a time-consuming and laborious process, and then yesterday I came across this document in the middle of a pale blue folder.

It took - I guess in total - probably about four or five hours of work to go through two pale blue folders, each containing to the order of 50 documents. This one was midway through the second folder that we went through.

Let me describe the document to you.

It is five pages long.

It is bound in a pale blue folder alongside lots of other documents, most of which are very routine and, frankly, rather dull

It bears the Iraqi eagle crest.

It bears the crest of the Iraqi intelligence service.

It carries the signature of the chief of the Iraqi intelligence service.

It is, of course, in Arabic.

It is bound in a pale blue folder alongside lots of other documents, most of which are very routine and frankly rather dull.

Most of them are just correspondence across the desk of Iraqi foreign ministers during the year 2000.

The idea someone would have forged this document, bound it in a pale blue folder, buried it beneath lots of other folders in a blackened room in the first floor of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry on the off-chance that a British journalist might go there and might search through it and might find it and then might translate it, strikes me as so wildly improbable as to be virtually inconceivable.

I'm not sure that it is too odd that it is coming to light right now.

After all, right now, for the first time, Iraq has no government and Iraqi government ministries are effectively open to anybody who wants to walk in and look for documents.

Hundreds of journalists have been doing exactly that for the last week."

Needless to say, Galloway's threatening to sue. He's probably going to lose, which is worse than if he just shut up and did nothing.

There's a document that says he took the money, and if the Telegraph is confident enough to print the allegations, the forgery's not quite as shoddy as parts of the infamous government portfolio for Iraq's WMDs.

If he loses the case, it will be legal for anyone in the country to say, 'George Galloway was a supporter and paid crony of Saddam Hussein. He was a sympathiser to a war criminal."

At the moment, it's still, "...allegedly."


Could be a forgery, I suppose, but it's not as if Galloway's been the most vocal opponent of the war (Robin Cook seems more in line for dirty tricks than anyone else), Blair's already got his post-Falklands polls boost.

Okay, maybe not a hoax.

This is from the BBC site:

Half-Life sequel due soon
The sequel to the hugely popular Half-Life computer game is due for release this year.
Games gossip sites on the net have been set buzzing this weekend by the announcement that Half-Life 2 will be on show at the forthcoming E3 trade fair.

Half-Life maker Valve Software has also said that the finished version of the game should be on sale by the end of 2003.

The release of the game has been eagerly anticipated by gamers who have become big fans of the original.

Top title

Half-Life has been a firm favourite among computer gamers ever since it first appeared in late 1998.

At the time of its release Half-Life won praise for its strong plotting, intricate puzzles, atmosphere and the intelligence of the in-game enemies that players had to take on.

The game put players in the shoes of hapless laboratory assistant Gordon Freeman, who, thanks to a catastrophic accident, gets the job of saving the world from legions of inter-dimensional beasties.

Interest in the game has been maintained over the last few years by regular updates, such as Opposing Force and Blue Shift, which gave players the chance to take on the role of other people forced to deal with the invasion of monsters.

Half-Life also spawned Counter-Strike which is now the net's most popular multi-player game.

Despite being years old Half-Life regularly tops reader polls in games magazines that chart players' favourite titles.

So far details of the eagerly anticipated Half-Life 2 are scant but Valve has said that games magazines can write about the game from 28 April.

It is not yet known whether the new Half-Life follows the original and remains a first-person shooter.

Some changes look likely if the cover of Belgian games magazine PC Gameplay is any guide. The cover shows a screenshot from the game in which hero Gordon Freeman is seen standing next to a woman in a wintry landscape.

Valve is planning to show much more at the Electronics Entertainment Expo to be held in Los Angeles from the 13-16 May.

Despite being eagerly, awaited the new Half-Life will face much stiffer competition than its first incarnation because so many games have built on and improved the game-play techniques that the original pioneered

If nothing else Half-Life 2 will face a threat from Doom III, another eagerly anticipated title that is due for release soon.

Some suspect that, despite Valve's claims, the development of the game will slip and it will not be released this year.

------------------

My brother just walked into my room, without knocking (as per usual, the little shit), and I told him about this article. He said, 'Thank you, for doubting me.'

Who the fuck does he think he is? Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, risen from the dead the day before yesterday to walk among us for another week before ascending to sit on the right hand of the Father?

(Any other father would be put in prison for inviting his son to sit on his hand, heh heh heh...)


And since when has Gordon Freeman been a lab assistant? Okay, he was younger and more able to beat the shit out of US Black Ops troops, but he was also a graduate from MiT with some bizarrely titled PhD.

www.whitehouse.org

Not to be confused with www.whitehouse.gov...

Check out the patriotic posters, not to be confused with 'propaganda'.

Slee's linked to me from his blog, The Lattice, which is nice. Except that he appears to have labelled the link as: 'Richard - the Archangel'.

Now, that's inaccurate, I'm not the Archangel, I'm Archangel, pure and simple. I have never laid any claim onto a senior rank within the Celestial Hosts of our Lord. I am merely 'Archangel'.

If I recall, the name comes from two sources, not just the one. My novel, which features angels as good guys, bad guys and all shades of grey in between - often all in the same angel, at the same time.

And then there's Gabrielle.

Gabrielle Archangelsk, to be exact.

She was a pseudonym for filling in suspicious mailing lists online. I think I even had a Hotmail account set up in her name.

Hmm, I'll have to play her in a roleplaying campaign sometime. Maybe if I end up in Tom's Space: 1889 game, I could be a female Russian aristo adventuress or something.

...

Of course, when one looks more closely at Slee's links list, one sees the line below. I demonstrate here:

Richard - the Archangel
of Ponce

Craig Slee, my good friend, might be a fantastic, intelligent, intellectual kind of guy...

...but sometimes he's just a git.

:-p

It's amazing how dedicated some people can be. First there were those two guys who kept the British Embassy in Kabul safe, now there's this guy:

Lost British graveyard found in Iraq
The Royal British Legion has welcomed news that a lost graveyard for World War I dead has been found in central Iraq.
The cemetery at Al Amara, built for those on the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, has been discovered by the banks of the Tigris river.

It was found by the Royal Irish Regiment, who on Easter Sunday will say prayers at the cemetery for those who died and for the current armed forces.

The site had been protected by its Iraqi keeper, who received death threats from Baath officials.

Hassan Hatif Moson, a 40-year-old father of seven, told the Daily Mail, in a pooled despatch from Iraq: "The old regime, they threatened my life and my job but I never gave up.

"I could not permit the graveyard to be ruined - local people have tried to break in here to drink late at night and also to steal the carvings.

"I always believed that one day the British would return."

'Good news'

The cemetery, which includes two Victoria Cross winners, was abandoned by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission after the last Gulf War.

Jeremy Lillies, head of public affairs for the Royal British Legion, said: "This is very good news. It is extremely good to hear that this chap has stuck to his guns in the face of a great deal of intimidation to keep the place in as good order as he could do.

"The good news now is that something can be done about it."
He said the Commonwealth War Graves Commission had a warehouse full of new headstones in Baghdad, but their distribution had been delayed by the war.

The headstones at Al Amara were plundered by an earlier Iraqi regime in 1937.

But Mr Hassan kept the memorial polished, saved the masonry from looters and cut the grass.

He worked without pay since the last Gulf war and kept all the documents relating to the graveyard since he took the keeper's job in 1977.

That thoughtfulness will enable thousands of British families to trace the final resting place of their loved ones.
Royal Irish Commanding Officer Lt Colonel Tim Collins led a team of officers in search of the cemetery after hearing about it from local people.

He said: "It is quite remarkable what Mr Hassan has achieved - this place has been better tended than some of the war graves in France.

"He has shown great respect to the British and courage in the face of the Baath regime by carrying this burden of the empire."

The two Victoria Cross recipients are Royal Naval Lt Commander Edgar Cookson and Lt Colonel Edward Henderson of the North Staffordshire Regiment.

The condition of Al Amara was in contrast with another British military cemetery near Basra, which was found in a state of disrepair.

It contained hundreds of soldiers and officials who died over a series of campaigns from 1880 onwards.

US pioneer plans to offer spaceflights
By Dr David Whitehouse
BBC News Online science editor

Burt Rutan, the man behind the only aircraft to fly non-stop around the world without refueling, has unveiled what he calls the world's first private space programme.
The unveiling of Mr Rutan's space hardware, said to be at a mature stage of development, will undoubtedly push the race to become the first private astronaut into its final stages.

A capsule, rocket motors and the aircraft from which the capsule will be launched into space have been shown for the first time at Mr Rutan's base in California.

Experts are taking the initiative seriously, saying that Mr Rutan's track record and new technology put him on course to win the so-called X-prize for the first non-government spaceflight.

'No dreams or mock-ups'

Mr Rutan says he is tired of waiting for others to provide affordable human space access, referring to the high cost of American and Russian manned spaceflights.

For the past two years he has carried out what he describes as a secret and aggressive manned sub-orbital space programme in the Mojave Desert in California.

He told BBC News Online: "The event is not about dreams, predictions or mock-ups. We will show actual flight hardware: an aircraft for high-altitude airborne launch, a flight-ready manned spaceship, a new, ground-tested rocket propulsion system and much more."
Mr Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, describes itself as the most prolific research aircraft development company in the world.

It has been involved in numerous advanced aeronautical projects such as the Voyager aircraft that flew non-stop around the world in nine days in 1986.

The company also had a major role in the Pegasus rocket which is launched into space from beneath the wing of a carrier aircraft. That technology has placed numerous small satellites into orbit.

The rocket and capsule that will take the astronauts into space will be air-launched from a derrivative of his Proteus high-altitude aircraft.

Proteus has set three world altitude records for its class, reaching an altitude of 62,786 feet (19,137 metres) and carrying a one-ton payload to 55,878 feet (17,032 metres) in 2000.

X-prize contenders

Scattered throughout the world, many teams are vying for the $10m X-prize for the first non-government team to launch a three-person crew into space and safely return them to Earth. It has to be done twice in 10 days.

Many competitors are using conventional rockets, but balloons to take rockets to high altitudes and more ambitious systems are being considered by some.

But Mr Rutan is keen to say he has all he needs.

"This is not just the development of another research aircraft, but a complete manned space programme with all its support elements," he said.

"We are not seeking funding and are not selling anything. We are in the middle of an important research programme - to see if manned space access can be done by other than the expensive government programmes."

"After the unveiling, we will go back into hiding to complete the flight tests and conduct the space flights," Mr Rutan says.

Analysts are expecting an attempt on the X-prize early next year by Mr Rutan and possible one or two other X-prize contenders as well.


Could we be on the first steps towards space colonisation?

Governments will never put funding into something like this unless a) they're unaccountable dictatorships with huge economies, or b) the end of the world is nigh, so the only option is private space travel.

Corporations setting up extra-planetary tax havens, where environmental concerns 'don't matter' - permanent research stations and factories in orbit, or on the moon, or maybe even Mars (although that'd be a bit too expensive). Of course, employees up there will need some way of feeding themselves, and entertainment, and residences. Therefore, a small village is set up, which gradually expands, and hey presto, a city off Earth.

Not exactly ideal that the first thing we export into space is unbridled, unrestricted capitalism, but with the way most governments see space research as a money pit, it's going to take an incredibly wealthy private individual or corporation to make it happen.

After it's been proven to be feasible, it probably won't be long before governments get in on it.

I amAzathoth! Known as the "Blind Idiot God", the center of all cycles known as Azathoth is the great void itself, infinite creation and inescapable oblivion made one. The Great God is without ego, as it has been embodied in a seperate consciousness as Azathoth has cast off the curse of self-awareness. Surrounded by the host of flautist servitors, piping the songs of the unknowable, Azathoth is not to be known by his aspirants. That is the purpose of another God...

Which Great Old One are you?

Some of the most romantic song lyrics I've heard in a while (no prize, but let's see how many people get it):

And if a double decker bus
Crashes into us,
To die by your side,
Such a heavenly way to die.

And if a ten ton truck
Kills the both of us,
To die by your side,
Well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine.