Le Communard

You get no respect.

Close. It's Crusader Kings. It runs on the old EU engine, that's probably why it seems so familiar. I wasn't aware anyone here played Paradox though. Do you have III by any chance?

Medieval 2? Try some real history.

You mean you weren't being ironic?

Hah--you allmost had me for a second with that one! I suggest if you're interested in determining the deeper meaning of the passage you perhaps study the contextual material provided in the Critical Edition: Post 2.

Showed it's hand? The entire last two episodes were done "on the couch"--I'd say it did more than show it's hand. On top of that, I'm pretty familiar with Kabbalah, and I can tell you it had little to nothing to do with it beyond gratuitous symbolism. Even then, though, I will admit, it did have some depths, and can be fun to pick apart in a sort of post-modernist exercise. The one thing I really wonder about this show is why its so popular. I mean, I liked it, but I'm not exactly normal even in these sort of circles.

Sort of like Tom Holt's My Hero? It seems pretty funny--I might check it out if I ever get time to read again.

Pssh, that man can nay tell a hawk from a handsaw.

I'm not sure if you have the water-discipline for that. Perhaps if you tame a Great Maker you might prove yourself. Jane Eyre? Funny, and I just had someone suggest that book earlier today.

Well, I guess you get credit for trying.

Hah: and the irony is complete! But as amusing as it is to me to spit in the wind, now with my dearth of boon companions, I've decided lately its time for me to finds a new calling. Ta-ta, then, gentelmen--there's no fortune to be made in wits and words here. Perhaps I'll stop back for a spot of tea... but perhaps not. No, I've cracked one too many good ones to an empty house--my days prowling FFTF are over. Live long and prosper.

GUILDENSTERN and ROSENCRANZ: The People of SF The PLAYER: The good Le Communard GUIL: So you've caught up. PLAYER (tops): Not yet! (Bitterly.) You left us. GUIL: Ah! I'd forgotten - you performed a dramatic spectacle by the wayside - a thing much thought of in the New Testament. How did yours compare as an impromptu? PLAYER: Badly - neither witnessed nor reported. GUIL: Yes, I'm sorry we had to miss it. I hope you didn't leave anything out - I'd be furious to think I didn't miss all of it. (The PLAYER, progressively aggrieved, now burst out.) PLAYER: We can't look each other in the face! (Pause, more in control.) You don't understand the humiliation of it - to be tricked out of a single assumption, which makes our existence viable - that somebody is watching... The plot was two corpses gone before we caught sight of ourselves, stripped naked in the middle of nowhere and pouring ourselves down a bottomless well. ROS: Is that thirty eight? PLAYER (lost): There we are - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. (He rounds on them.) Don't you see?! We're actors - we're the opposite of people! (They recoil nonplussed, his voice calms.) Think, in your head, now, think of the most... private... secret... intimate... thing you have ever done secure in the knowledge of its privacy... (He gives them - and the audience - a good pause. ROS takes a shifty look.) Are you thinking of it? (He strikes with his voice and his head.) Well, I saw you do it! (ROS leaps up, dissembling madly.) ROS: You never! It's a lie! (He catches himself with a giggle in a vacuum and sits down again.) PLAYER: We're actors... We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade; that someone would be watching. And than, gradually, no one was. We were caught, high and dry. It was not until the murder's long soliloquy that we were able to look around; frozen we were in the profil, our eyes searched you out, first confidently, then hesitantly, then desperately as each patch of turf, each log, each exposed corned in every direction proved uninhabited, and all the while the murderous King addressed the horizon with his dreary interminable guilt... Our heads began to move, wary as lizards, the corpse of unsullied Rosalinda peeped through his fingers, and the King faltered. Even then, habit and a stubborn trust that our audience spied upon us from behind the nearest bush, forced our bodies to blunder on long after they had emptied of meaning, until like runaway carts they dragged to a halt. No one came forward. No one shouted at us. The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself upon us; it was obscene. We took off our crowns and swords and cloth of gold and moved silent on the road to Elsinore. ;)

THE HORROR CONTINUES!

Recovered from the Journal of John Staley of Boston. I …There it was before me—finally after all this time—the lair of the thing itself. Now that we had gotten this far I wasn’t sure I was ready to take the final leap though: there had been something about those alien angles and the constant faint gargling that had unsettled something deep within my soul. That and the uncomfortable changes in pressure that had occurred at seemingly random intervals during the last legs of the journey. I remarked about my enkindled doubts to the Professor who shoved them aside—what we did was for the necessity of science, he explained, and we must push on no matter our personal reservations. However, even the incorrigible Professor’s voice showed strain. After the loss our Guide to the bats, and the cryptic hieroglyphis in the Great Hall, he had not quite been the same. His voice faded out leaving us shaded in that oppressive silence that squeezed the soul like a vice. Suddenly, as I tuned back to the orifice that confronted us in the center of the rough-hewn chamber, out of that hole as black as the deepest reaches of the cosmos, began to emerge something. The sight of it was too terrible to even describe. I could only ever see part of its weird, misshapen mass, but even that was enough to unsettle my faith in the power of rational thought—there are some things out in the depths of the world and the human mind that should never be disturbed: primordial forces lain dormant since the dawn of time, forces and beings from beyond the limits of our imagination. What I glimpsed of it from the seemingly insignificant light of my torch was a series of cyclopean tentacles, each larger than a mans waist across, and the faint hints of a greater shape behind, like that of a prehistoric mollusk as are being discovered in such quantities these days, but on a scale unprecedented to man. A series of low, vicious ‘hee-ghaww’ sounds emanated from the terror, and in that instant I knew the entire operation had been had great mistake. I turned to the Professor, to urge him to flee, however, it was too late. It had all been too much for the Professors mind already, and this was but the final straw: he could only gape openmouthed with the expression of the most terrible horror upon his face. I began to run with all my might, obeying not any conscious thought, but the panicked urgings of my subconscious mind. The beast continued its inexorable approach. II I jolted with more strength then I had ever known myself to possess. As I fled the chamber, I head the Professor let loose a blood curdling scream, born from the innermost depths of his soul, and glanced back against my better judgment—the beast had enraptured him in one of his great appendages, and was drawing him towards itself as he struggled against its grip. I renewed my flight as I grasped my torch with a death grip, lest I drop it and remain in this hell forever like the Professor. I fled back down the maze of passages that would return me to the Great Hall: as little as I wished to revisit that place, it was the only option, for the beast was too large to follow me through that rats warren of tunnels. I do not know how long I sped blindly before I reigned enough of what little sanity I had left to formulate a cogent plan of escape. But escape was not the only thing on my mind. If I had leaned anything in these ill-fated sojourning, it was that the beast must not be allowed to escape the confines of the Complex. Who knows what unthinkable horrors it would have unleashed upon the world of light? Even from the comparative safety of the tunnels I could still hear the terrible cries of the beast, which filled me with an even greater terror and spurred me on, solidifying in me the knowledge of what must be done.

Nothing less the a Fabian fifth column! A fifth column I say!

...I can only imagine. Get right down there with Ramey and Robeson, eh?

Heh, so I was looking though my files and found my old Korobushka* recording. Figured you'll might be interested. There's a lot of mistakes (especially that second octave jump. Blehhh.), and my Russian is terrible, and it's pretty old too, but it's alright. I'm just playing along with the chords on my piano. *You might know it as Tetris Theme A. It's a very famous Russian folk song. EDIT: I'd be interested in hearing a little bit from everyone else, if they don't mind. I probably have the worst voice here, so you're already good in comparison :D .

Reppin Bass here. Well, Barritone, really, but I always end up with the Bass part. I've really only got down to the D3, but on the other hand, I get up around even the B4 on a good day, so it's all even in the end. Not at all like my Russian friend, though, whose a true Bass--he belts it even down at the B2 and is three years younger then me. If only he'd practice. I'm a bad choral singer to be honest, though. I have too much of the solo artist impulse--directors usually don't like it when you try and swing Gregorian chant.

Colony Drop!

Just because they need the love, I give you all the greatest instrumental band ever conceived: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xoSVZO-814&feature=related

It would have been better as the structure of KCl.

I've been won. This is worth my time. Thanks for the help.

What exactly are the movies, though? Are they squeals, an alternate timeline, s retelling? I don't get it, and I really don't want to Google it for fear of massive spoilage. Almost done now. Still trying to figure out why Gendo looks like Abe Lincoln.

I am game for a bout this second, if you are so inclined.

Finishing up EVA. I was about to drop this at ~ episode thirteen, but then they stopped wasting time fighting random angles and pumped the Freud up to 11. With all the daddy issues being thrown around I'm surprised none of the women have declared there desire for male genitalia. I’m stiff not digging the biblical stuff, though—it’s so superfluous, there doesn’t even seem to be any meaning to it at all beyond gratuitous symbolism. Nevertheless, it’s starting to get kind of interesting, and I’m glad I stuck with it. Oh, and, does anyone know what I watch after the original series?