jakesquid has just totally made my day.

Click this link. Go on. I dare ya!

But whatever you do, DON'T CLICK THIS ONE! IT IS FORBIDDEN! DON'T DO IT! YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED! NO!

It's St. Crispin's Day again, and that means that it's time for everyone on livejournal to post a really well-known English poem about patriotism and war. Hooray!


Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


Oh, wait. Was that the wrong really well-known English poem about patriotism and war?

Gosh.

Sorry about that.

Rebecca of Hitherby Dragons (syndicated on livejournal as hitherbydragons) has returned to her "Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth" arc this week.

Well, color me psyched! Everything that Rebecca writes on Hitherby Dragons is breathtakingly awesome, but I was particularly fond of the House of Saints story (which Rebecca herself identified as "darker" than her usual fare - I guess I'm just a Goth at heart), and it occurs to me that Harry Potter people, who comprise most of my friends list, might have a particular fondness for these stories as well.

So, I plug.

The Houses were born of Vladimir's hubris.

His "sorting hat" reshaped the students of his school into five distinct Houses. It changed their nature. It subjected them to the rules of their House. It committed a crime against their humanity.

Thus Peter, of the House of Saints, interceded for others even unto his death.

And Cheryl, of the House of Dreams, lives with lightning in her mind.

And Sid, of the House of Torment, hurt until he died.

And Saul, of the House of Hunger, has become a beast.

Their story began with House of Saints, here. But there are truths the saints would never know.

—Standing In the Storm: the Keepers' House

I'm particularly pleased that this story looks to be focused on that "yellow-cap house." They were quite mysterious in the last one, and I confess that I was feeling hopelessly curious about them.

The first Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth story, House of Saints ("House of Saints is the story of a hat that dares sort men"), was written back in August. It's about ten episodes long, and starts here.

An excerpt:

"This trend is unsettling," says Peter. "I count just three of us in our good and gentle House, while the numbers of the evil green hats grow."

Bethany makes a sour face. "I do not trust this," she says. "Is it possible that we are suffering delusion?"

"Hm?" Peter asks.

"Our minds have been altered," says Bethany. "Could there be an insidious tainting of our perceptions, making us reject the House of Hunger just because they wear green hats and eat people?"

"Surely the sorting hat wouldn't lie to us about moral issues," Saul protests.

Okay, okay, so I'm emphasizing the HP riffs, and I'm doing it purely in the hopes of getting you all hooked. But there's a lot more to it that. It's—

Oh, hell. Just go read it. Seriously. Do. It's brilliant stuff.

Referral logs are often a source of merriment to me, but I don't usually see much need to share that mirth with others. I tend to feel that "aren't my referral logs funny?" journal entries fall into the same category as IM log transcripts and role-playing game session anecdotes: they are indeed sometimes quite amusing to others. . . but only very occasionally so.

So I'll spare you all the hilarity of the usual pornographic search strings that regularly land people at my website. I am a bit curious about this recent development, though.

These are the Google Search Strings that are accounting for around 90% of the traffic I'm getting this week:

"Why I dislike the twins"
"Weasley twins are bullies"
Weasley twins bullying
authorial intent twins bullying Rowling
"Harry Potter series" "Weasley Twins" bullying
What does it mean that the Weasley Twins are bullies?

Okay. Now, it's not that I don't usually get a few hits every now and again from people Googling around in search of stuff on the Weasley Twins and bullying. It usually accounts for a handful of pings a day. But this is truly unusual, so now I feel compelled to ask: Is there some huge discussion of the Twins and bullying going on somewhere this week? Or something else that might account for the sudden upsurge of interest in this topic?

Does anyone have any ideas?

ETA: Indeed, it's quite possibly due to The Witching Hour, which has a presentation on the subject of bullying. Thanks, David!

anaid_rabbit asked me why I didn't like Serenity, or to be more accurate (as I didn't dislike the movie), why my reaction to it was pretty much a "meh." I started typing out a response, but since it got longish, I've decided to post it here instead. There are no major spoilers here, but the extremely spoiler-averse (with whom I sympathize, as I am one of them myself) might still consider it something they wouldn't want to see, so I've placed it behind a cut.

This is not really a review at all. It's more a rambling musing on how I feel about the practice of taking a serialized work of fiction that began in one medium, and then concluding or continuing it in an entirely different one.

( Some Very Rambly Serenity Thoughts )

ETA: The exceptionally spoiler-averse should be aware that there are some spoilers in the comments.

Thank you for the anniversary wishes! We got back from our trip Tuesday night, but I'm only now getting caught up on what everyone has been up to. I'll likely post a boring trip summary later on, complete with vacation snapshots. Because we all know how everyone loves being subjected to other people's vacation snapshots. Oh yes.

Although as some of you have probably noticed, human rights issues take up a good deal of my mental and emotional energy these days, I'd resolved not to post about them here anymore. There are numerous reasons for that, but perhaps the most basic of them are: I am not particularly articulate on the subject, I don't really enjoy writing about it, and I don't think that I or anyone else derives any benefit from my attempting to do so. Today, though, I'm making an exception.

These are the nine members of the US Senate who voted against the anti-torture amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill:

• Wayne Allard, of Colorado


• Christopher Bond, of Missouri


• Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma


• Thad Cochran, of Mississippi


• John Cornyn, of Texas


• James Inhofe, of Oklahoma


• Pat Roberts, of Kansas


• Jeff Sessions, of Alabama


• Ted Stevens, of Alaska

I do not feel in the least bit congratulatory over the passage of this amendment. I am far too disgusted by the fact that this political move was even necessary, that this was something that had to be added on in a backdoor fashion to a defense appropriations bill. There is nothing exciting or joyful about that: it is an occasion for shame.

Nonetheless, I did feel a certain need to put the names of those who objected up here, to see them written in black and white, to be able to look at the list and tell myself: "These nine men publicly support torture. Yet they will not be shunned. They will continue to break bread with people who consider themselves decent folk. They will continue to be the movers and shakers of this nation."

There's really very little point in my writing about this crap on my boring and rarely-used on-line journal. I'm not even entirely sure why I find myself doing so.

It ought to be written in blood.