Juliana Ashley

My character Juliana Ashley as drawn by Akiko!

Angel Augustine Saint John

A Comission of Angel Augustine Saint John drawn by Akiko.

A Book By Its Cover

A mock up book cover I made for my story Heaven Forbid!

To the Heart of the Elitist

I got this off the forum site that I frequent and I have read over it and I think this guy hit the nail right on the head with this statement. It might be about movies but it applied to everything from a media standpoint, movies, music, art, all of it!

"The only way to snipe at things that are critically hailed and publicly adored are to call them "overrated," since such a claim is impossible to refute empirically. Should anyone disagree, one can simply label their tastes inferior and/or uninformed and call it a day. Those who do not enjoy a particular work of pop media often feel compelled to rationalize their dislike. They generally do this by adopting an elitist mentality wherein they consider the populace to be drawn to a certain work for shallow or unjustified reasons, thus not only legitimizing their own opinion but elevating it above the majority in such a way that it cannot be easily refuted. While a person confident in the justification of their opinion would simply say, "I don't enjoy this, but I can understand why others would," or something to that effect, the insecure elitist would say, "people enjoy this because they don't know any better".

Katana VS Gun

I had this argument with another writer back when I was showing him my story and he kept suggesting that I make a character that used a katana and was a skilled swordsman but a Human.

I basically told him that it wouldn't work in the universe I had created because the enemies were demons and too strong for someone to take on with their hands. Even with a weapon, they'd get murdered.

Then today someone on Deviant Art posted a list of quotes they pulled out of a conversation about swords versus guns. The comments are really badly put together and most of them are people proclaiming how easily a modern soldier would be killed by a sword and one person even went on to say how a ninja could take down a tank...

There was even this comment that a katana could cut through seven fifty caliber rounds! Fifty caliber rounds will go through an engine. Not sure if anyone here has seen one, but a fifty caliber round is serious business.

This is yet another example of the over romanticization of swords and katanas, along with rampant fanboy/girlism. Its sad that people think this kind of logic applies in the real world. So what a katana can cut seven bullets in half? Even from a small arm such as a Beretta, you can empty a whole clip in seconds before the sword wielder can get to you.

There is a wide belief that sword beats gun.

Carlin Dead

To tell the truth I never found him funny or respected his opinions on religion or a lot of things...I hadn't even thought about the guy in years.

Ah well here comes the hero worship? I know he's dead and all but I wonder if sometimes we deify the dead too often when they really didn't deserve it. I mean I don't think Carlin's material has been funny for quite sometime and most of the time when it was it was few and far between.

Its one thing to say someone lived too short a life, but when someone older dies who was famous and all, I wonder why everyone thinks they have to be made into this figure of worship for a short amount of time?

It seems very...wrong to me for some reason.

One thing I have to say is that for all his denouncement of God and making fun of religion...only he knows the answer for sure now.

A Tornado...right.

Watching PJ play Sim City...and someone tell me how a Tornado starts a fire in a PILE OF BRUSH.

The Writer

When I was at work one day I mentioned I liked to write and this other guy was talking to me about it. Basically the way that things went we were talking about writing and the like, he kept telling me about the "Great American Novel". How he wanted to write a coming of age story, and something about the "human condition" he went on to be more ambiguous than that. I realized that we couldn't talk about writing right then because he was more or less trying to show off.

Plenty of people who are artists have probably experienced this...you meet someone and you try to talk to them about art or your craft and you realize that they're just fighting to impress you. There is a difference between someone who is really good sharing their achievements and someone who is just trying to show off. He was the latter. He would write at work, urge everyone to read it. I never actually did at first.

One day one of the girls at the desk behind me asked me what I had done the night before. I told her I had been writing and what I had been working on. I went on to say I had finished up this car chase scene I was particularly proud of. Of course he had some comment to make on this, "I used to write stuff like that..." he paused here I am sure for dramatic effect, "...but then I grew up."

He was completely serious, there was no joke there and I had to ask him how that mentality made any kind of sense. I don't know why I entertained the idea of talking about it with him. This guy had shown himself to be pretty ignorant already. Actually he'd shown himself to be pretty immature in his writing too. When I finally read the story I was shocked to see that there was no description, no anything, the grammar was horrid. And more than anything the story was little more than sex talk and ambiguous conversation about people's emotions.

More notable than anything was when he asked me to read this page or so where this hobo told his main character how he makes money by sleeping with rich women. The hobo went on to say that the rich women were "dirty" and liked to say things like "spank me you dirty bum." I don't think I have to tell you that I almost had laugh in his face. It was hard not to. Someone who writes something that ridiculously shitty should castrate them self just out of fear that they could have a kid who might inherit their horrible skill.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes?

Sorry about the title, I couldn't resist. But in all truth the FDA has gone too far! I love tomatoes and am willing to take the risk but all of the fast food places around here blacklisted them! This is so unfair! For those of you that don't know, I really love tomatoes and they're one of the things I just have to have on a hamburger when I get one. So it should come as no surprise this upsets me.

A Horrible Human Being

I was going post something silly about movies. But I caught wind of this story and I have to say that its the most heinous thing that I've heard in a while. Its a long read and a horrifying ordeal that this woman went through and not really a read for the squeamish.

The time crept by so slowly and painfully that the 23-year-old Columbia University journalism student had decided it was time to end her life.

Over many torturous hours, she had been repeatedly raped, sodomized and forced to perform oral sex, a prosecutor told a jury on Thursday. The accused, Robert A. Williams, 31, had doused the woman’s face and body with boiling water and bleach, forced her to swallow handfuls of pills and to chase them with beer, sealed her mouth with glue, and bound her wrists and legs with shoelaces, cords and duct tape, said the prosecutor, Ann P. Prunty. And now, Ms. Prunty said, he was asking the woman to gouge out her own eyes with a pair of scissors.

And so the woman, sitting on the floor of her studio apartment in Hamilton Heights and holding a pair of scissors between her knees — the blade pointing toward her face — tried to stop the suffering. She lowered her face to the blade, but turned her head at the last moment, trying to stab herself in the neck instead of her eyes.

The scissors slipped from her grasp, the suicide attempt failed, and the woman suffered several more hours of torture, Ms. Prunty said.

The woman survived the nearly 19-hour ordeal, which ended, Ms. Prunty said, when she used a fire started by Mr. Williams to burn the cords that secured her wrists to a futon.

Mr. Williams went on trial Thursday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, where he faces 71 criminal counts, including attempted murder, rape, arson and assault. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Mr. Williams, who was homeless at the time of his arrest about a week later at the scene of a burglary in Queens, has a lengthy police record dating to his childhood, the authorities have said.

He was charged in a murder as a juvenile, though the outcome of that case is sealed, a law enforcement official said, and he spent eight years in prison for an attempted-murder conviction in 1996.

The prosecution began presenting its case with Ms. Prunty’s vivid, step-by-step account of the attack, which she said began about 10 p.m. on April 13, 2007, and lasted until 4 p.m. the following afternoon. Mr. Williams’s lawyer, Arnold J. Levine, did not make an opening statement. Outside the courtroom, Mr. Levine declined to talk about his strategy. In hearings before the trial, he seemed to indicate that he would challenge witnesses’ identification of his client.

The victim and several witnesses in the six-story apartment building where the woman lived picked out Mr. Williams from lineups, Ms. Prunty said. She said that DNA evidence also linked him to the crime.

Justice Carol Berkman, who is presiding over the trial, found in October that Mr. Williams was mentally fit for trial. After that decision, Mr. Levine said he was considering a mental illness defense.

As Ms. Prunty delivered her opening statement, Mr. Williams sat slouched in his chair, with his head tilted downward.

On the night of the attack, the victim, a month from graduating with a master’s degree, was at Columbia, putting the final touches on her résumé for a job fair the next day, Ms. Prunty said. When she arrived at her apartment building, she got on the elevator and found Mr. Williams inside, Ms. Prunty said. She rode with him to her floor, and could hear him follow her as she navigated the long L-shaped hallway to her apartment.

As the woman entered her apartment, Ms. Prunty said, Mr. Williams asked her if she knew where a Mrs. Evans lived. The woman stopped to answer.

“Her kind moment of hesitation would cost her,” Ms. Prunty said.

Mr. Williams forced his way into the apartment, Ms. Prunty said, put the woman in a chokehold, and slapped her cellphone from her hand. Mr. Williams slammed the door behind him, and “her Friday the 13th nightmare began,” Ms. Prunty said.

Mr. Williams turned a clock by the woman’s bed to the wall and made her take off her watch so she would not know what time it was, Ms. Prunty said. He raped her repeatedly and cut her hair because “he wanted to see her face, her fear and humiliation.”

He made her sit in her bathtub, and that was the first time he told her to gouge her eyes, Ms. Prunty said. He punished her for refusing by boiling water in a kettle and throwing it on her, the prosecutor said. The water jolted her so much that she broke through the bonds on her wrist, Ms. Prunty said, as the skin on her chest, torso and thighs blistered. (On hearing this detail, one of the jurors shook his head and covered his mouth.)

“Just kill me! Just kill me!” the woman pleaded, Ms. Prunty said.

Later, after her failed attempt to kill herself with the scissors, Mr. Williams threw a heavy object at the back of her head, cracking her skull, Ms. Prunty said.

Mr. Williams was intent on damaging her vision because, Ms. Prunty said, “a blind witness could never identify her attacker.”

Mr. Williams eventually slit the woman’s eyelids and face with a butcher knife, Ms. Prunty said, but she did not lose her vision. He fastened her legs and arms to a futon, and she lost consciousness.

When she awoke, she again pleaded for him to kill her, but heard no response. He was gone.

Mr. Williams “only stopped when he could no longer feel the scourge of control over another human being,” Ms. Prunty said.

The woman smelled smoke, Ms. Prunty said, so she wriggled her legs free and pulled the futon away from the wall. She used the fire to free her arms, Ms. Prunty said, and then ran through the smoke to her door. It took her several attempts to open it because her hands were limp and numb, Ms. Prunty said.

The woman ran through her hallway seeking help, Ms. Prunty said, “an image of the walking, living dead.”

This is precisely why I believe so strongly in the Death Penalty...

Strip Clubs

I don't get the appeal behind strip clubs, especially to men who have wives and girlfriends (mostly because its just a good way to get yourself in trouble). Now I've never been to one and don't plan to go really. But its all they talk about at work some of the time. They talk about going to the strip club and eating for lunch and once or twice tried to talk me into going. I told them my basic stance on the whole thing, considering that I hardly drink and I don't want to look at strange women dance around nude; I doubt its the place for me.

I guess I can't knock something that I don't exactly know about. Even though I don't believe in trying everything. I do know, that by law you can't touch the women. If you can't touch them you're buying gas, paying a cover and watching nude women when you could do it from home on the computer of free. You can hardly click a link on the web without having nude women vaulted at you online.

Personally, I don't like the idea of watching strippers in any way shape, or fashion. Even if its a Bachelor party, if it were someone else's I'm not going to attend and if it were my own and someone called a dancer, I'd walk out. I don't have a problem with fun, but its just not fun to me (especially if I'm the one getting married soon after, its just wrong). If other people like that and have fun like that, its all fine and good. But they need to understand its not for everyone and some people have their own reasons for that.

When the conversation first came up at work the whole thing was about how everyone should see a naked woman in person, there is one guy at work who actually hasn't and they pick on him the most. He's kind of socially shy and he's not very experienced with people let alone women. When they asked me about it, I gave no details, told them I had seen girls before and promptly shot down going to the strip club. I told them I don't want to see any girl naked that I'm not in love with, only insert a harsh tone of voice and a couple of choice words. Because of my brash nature and overall demeanor they pretty much left the issue alone with me. But when it comes to the other guy they bother him all the time about it. He has enough trouble talking to the girl across the desk form us and she's fully clothed.

I've always kind of wandered how normal women feel about men they know going to these sorts of things? The girls at work all seem to be sort of weird and all so I don't trust their opinions on much. I mean in my little area of the store alone we have a former nun and a girl who's admitting to paying for sex...so I'm more interested in a normal female perspective. What do you think when your guys to these places?

Mistake

Should I feel inclined to help you when you run head first into you're next set of mistakes. You willfully ignore every warning sign as you dash towards that next great thing. And before long you're crying and asking me how this could happen. You're telling me you don't know how guys use you so much. Maybe you wonder why you have low self esteem.

But I think I know why, its because you let yourself be had so easily in the same manner every time. Its a maneuver off the first page of the player handbook. You ride into his waiting arms afloat upon hollow words only to feel empty yourself and gain nothing besides the whispers behind your back and more tears when its all over. What's more is I'm supposed to listen to this same tale over and over.

"He seemed so trusting," you'll say.

I'll give you a comforting glance and pat you on the back, "There, there."

But that's the problem, I'm expected to sit idly by and pick up the same pieces from the same problem all the while everything I want or like is ignored. So this is it, my last hand in my little game. I'll deal myself out.

The UK Bans Child Porn

Now this is not what it may sound like. Child pornography has been banned for a while in the UK, but only the kind featuring actual children. The United Kingdom has decided that they want to pass a law to ban animated pornography depicting children. What I mean by this is porn of a hand or computer produced nature that features children would be banned and punishable by up to a three year sentence if you are found to have it.

For those who don't know, there is a large group of people on the net who use this kind of porn, either because they just like it or because they know sleeping with real children is not allowed. When the porn is "anime themed" it takes on the name lolicon which I have written about here before.

Now, the question I have here is, was this a good move? Is lolicon and other types of child porn like it being banned a good move? Or do you think since it doesn't actually harm people that its okay that this kind of thing exists?