Hey, Hellsing fandom! Look, I realize you guys are canon Nazis, but a lot of you seem to be forgetting something and trying to correct me on something that HAS no right answer.

Specifically; Alexander Anderson has NO set nationality. No seriously! When Walter is going over the information they have on Anderson, he specifically mentions that Anderson has no listed country of origin. No one knows where he came from, therefore, he has no KNOWN nationality.

Despite having no accent [or approximation of an accent as far as I know] in the original Japanese, the Dark Horse manga translation gave Anderson a thick, phonetic, Scottish brogue. I know nothing of Japanese dialects/accents, so I can't speak of his seiyu, but his dub voice actor is a native of Scotland. As far as the translators are concerned, Anderson's Scottish.

And yet, you guys persist in arguing with me in fic reviews and threads on forums that Anderson's Irish. You argue that it makes more sense regarding the religious and social politics going on in the series. And you're not wrong.

I'd engage in tl;dr about how the arguments you usually use against me to prove Anderson's Irishness fail, but I don't feel like it right now. The fact remains that canon gave him no nationality, and I'm just going with what the translators gave us.

Right or wrong, plausible or not, I like that interpretation and I'm sticking with it. I don't bother you folks who've decided to go with another interpretation, so leave my opinion alone already!

"No, thought Leisel as she walked. It's my heart that is tired. A thirteen-year-old heart shouldn't feel like this."

A former noblewoman who killed her husband, Magdalene la Bartarde is now the madam of the Old Priory Guesthouse, a small brothel under the care of the Bishop of Winchester. (Winchester subscribes to the medieval notion that without prostitutes, men will be ruled by lust and start raping good women.) Her cook is almost deaf, and of the three prostitutes under her care, one is mute, one is blind, and the other is a “simple” girl who almost always craves sex. When a messenger who visits the priory is found dead the next morning, she knows that she and her women will be blamed, and sets out to learn who killed him, working with Bellamy of Itchen, one of Winchester’s men who is assigned to the case.

Gellis does a good job of showing the brothel as being the kindest fate Magdalene’s women could realistically have without idealizing it, but while I’m fine with Sabina and Letice (blind and mute, respectively) and think they know exactly what they’re doing, I cringed every time Ella, the simple girl had a “friend,” as I’m not sure she understood her life beyond the fact that it let her have the sex she wanted without getting beaten or hurt and keeping her warm and fed. Knowing the reality of women like Ella with her social status and the lives of medieval prostitutes in general, I know this really is likely the safest and happiest life she could have, but the instinctive reaction is still there.

Magdalene is pretty interesting, and while I wasn’t very fond of her longtime protector, William, I’m very curious about her past. Bellamy has potential, but most of the book focused on how society and the church viewed prostitutes, even prostitutes with powerful protection. Somehow, it managed to be realistic there without being depressing, or make me hate every man in the book. That said, I wish we’d seen any women beyond Magdalene and her women, as all the other characters were men, and it’d be nice to see the female perspective of the world be a bit more diverse.

Tarot: Thank you, thank you to everyone who dropped by for a reading. It has been a wonderfully WONDERFULLY productive day for me, and I hope you all got something from it too. Special thanks to my pimpers; ysabetwordsmith , cassandramorgan , ellenmillion , miintikwa , and new friend nimitzbrood , and anyone else who sent people along that I either didn't realize or wasn't aware. Your generous help in spreading the word was very kind, and I thank you sincerely for your warmth in doing so. We got over 50 readings done, I'd started to count but then lost track (laughs); it was either 53 or 56, which I think is excellent! December's One-Card Draw will be on Wednesday, 16 December. Don't worry, I'll nag you thoroughly prior to hosting! Thanks again everyone, for your faith in the work I'm doing. I am going to bed tonight feeling very blessed indeed.

Continuing the apparent trend of rants about/involving Buffy, I have one of my own.

I don't mind seeing "the older man" or "the younger man" used once in a while, as long as it's clear. That said, in a scene with Giles and Spike (barring AUs), guess who shouldn't be referred to as "younger"?

That's right. Spike. You know, the vampire who was turned in 1880, well before Giles was born. Yeah, him.

The "man" bit doesn't even really bother me, even though Spike's not human anymore. But calling Spike younger than Giles is completely inaccurate, and I see good authors do this, too.

Please, Buffy authors, just remember that now matter how handsome James Marsters is (and I personally do think he is, mm-mm), his character is well over a hundred by the time the series rolls around. Giles? Not so much.

That is all.

<3

Edit: since this was brought up in the comments, I personally read "man" as referring to gender, not species. :)

Two mini-rants for the fanbrats.

~A few of you seem confused as to what makes an OP Sue.

"Tycan Fallon, one of the most wanted women in the Red Line, east and north blue, not to mention by the Navy as well. She has a crew which she's the captain of, and there's something else about Fallon as well. ZoloxOC SanjixOC"

There you go. Hope that helps.

As an aside, should you slap a character with the 'Water Water' fruit and say they can swim and control the entire sea I WILL slap the character with a Sue label and hit the back button. No questions asked.

~One Piece is NOT Bleach or Naruto.

That means unless you are doing a crossover, there is no miracle healing of wounds, no characters who are hundreds of years old and look 30, and no sudden clothing regeneration, and no random flying about. If you're going to pull these, be prepared to need a damn good explanation.

In the same vein, Bleach and Naruto are not One Piece, nor are they one another. Let's try to keep them separate, shall we?

Hi people,

This is a very sad time in my life in that my mother is very sick and possibly near to death. She seems to be feeling contemplative and I wondered if anyone could recommend any prose books or poems (books being my preference) that deal eloquently and philosophically with the subject of either severe illness or the reaper. They're for me not her. I want to try to understand her frame of mind as much as possible.

Thanks,

Sophie.

x

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don't
want them, so I take them back
and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists ...
... A stone on the path means the tea's not ready,
a stone in the hand means somebody's angry, the stone inside you still
hasn't hit bottom.

Richard Siken, Seaside Improvisation

As you may know, I, samanosukesgirl, have been made co-mod by lem0nlight.

You already recognise me. I'm the Crazy Canuck Lander who posts loads of pictures of Takeshi ♥ . He's in my pocket if you wish to speak to him.

Call me Samanosuke or Sammykins or my real name, Shannon. I'm witty, sarcastic, super nice and people get along with me easily. I take things seriously only when need be, so until then, I have fun times. :D

My PM settings are set to receive any from anyone here in LJ Land, so you can contact me for anything you wish if you want and I'll get back to you usually right away.

And my cat says hi!!

You were almost a Jill sandwich!! Don't I wish..

Dalton Montmorency is the current leader of the Liar’s Club, the group of spies from The Pretender and The Spy. A popular political cartoonist, Sir Thorogood, has recently published cartoons that make certain parts of the government nervous and annoy the privileged, and so he’s ordered to impersonate Sir Thorogood in hopes it will make the real one reveal himself. Sir Thorogood is actually Clara Simpson, a widow who lives with her husband’s sister and her family. Annoyed by the fake Sir Thorogood, she pretends to be a gaudy ninny so that she can annoy him with her fawning. In addition to Sir Thorogood, Clara also trades places with her neighbor’s mistreated maid, Rose, with said neighbor being the chief target of her cartoons. Having noticed Sir Thorogood’s favorite target, Dalton breaks into the neighbor’s house and presents himself as “Monty” to “Rose” who discovers him.

The comedy is great, but most of the book is Clara and Dalton sparring in one guise of the other, and they almost never interact without both pretending to be something they aren’t, and even apart, they spend most of the book thinking “in character.” At the end of the book, I’m not sure I really know what their “real” personalities are like, much less that they do. Bradley also spends so much time on the deceptions and keeping up with them that she never really solidly pins down motivations or plot. Still, it was highly entertaining.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NaNoWriMo/Home/~3/OH4Zc37hhLQ/3452586

Happy second half, Wrimos!

If you haven't already, check out the Donation Derby. There is a very exciting competition raging between regions all over the world!

As of November 16, the Kodiak Bears are led by Seattle, Washington; the Siberian Tigers are led by California's Elsewhere region; the Komodo Dragons are led by Vancouver, Washington; the Wolverines are led by DeKalb, Illinois; the Tasmanian Devils are led by Santa Fe, New Mexico; and the Badgers are led by Lake County, Ohio. Way to go regions. Stay tuned! there are sure to be upsets and last-minute surprises aplenty.

To learn more about the Donation Derby, read the FAQ!

Thanks so much to the folks who donate in other ways, too. You make our hearts (and taste buds!) so very, very happy.

Off to eat some more Kinder Surprise,
Lindsey

♥ With matchsticks Grandfather built his fragile defences against all the sorrows and difficulties of his life, with a little glue to bind them he was able to construct a kind of contentment.

♥ Their home, a building divided into many small flats, was called Sirkin House. What a tiny little place their fraction of it must have been. Pokey-home. Poxy-home. How inappropriate it is that their love, so huge a thing as it felt to them, could fit within so paltry a container. A thousand, thousand rooms, a palace the size of Versailles in France would have seemed a little more adequate to house the limitlessness of their adoration. But love, how extraordinary this is, does not generally require large quantities of space.

♥ Let us turn instead to Louis himself, for he is invariably there, or at least his body is - his mind travels increasingly longer distances until one day, surely not far from now, it will never come back.

♥ There are many people on this earth who believe the earth to be solid, who trust the surface that they step upon every day and trust it so implicitly that they scarcely even think of it. Terra firma they call it. But the earth is not to be trusted. There is a mighty subterranean engine beneath us and sometimes that engine vibrates and in those vibrations can be heard a roar, a roar of something that will dismiss any faith in that ground beneath our feet. Cracks open and from somewhere down below terror pours out.

♥ Suddenly, with each new morning, with each new minute more precious than ever before, came a strange bravery. The quake had tried to teach us that we had little control over ourselves, that we were insignificant and flimsy; but some Entrallans rebelled from that lesson. In those days it was possible to see people wandering about the city suddenly stop dead with a vast smirk on their face, stick out their tongues or raise their fingers in a salute of derision and yell (either down at the ground or up at the sky, depending on whether they were religious or not), filled with this new boldness: 'Give that to your hunchback daughter!' And afterwards they might run off to murder procrastination. Yes, now timid people, who without the earthquake might ever have remained so, proclaimed love to shocked friends or neighbours or bust into their offices and, filled with a flowing inspiration that sped them onwards, became great achievers - freed from their chains of shyness. There was a great sense of doing in the city then; the prostitutes in the Sex District were exhausted...

♥ I've always found libraries sexual places. I cannot say why exactly. Perhaps it is because there are so many other people sitting around quietly, and it is a good place to people-watch, and because it is often easier to spend time dreaming up imaginary romances with people just a few desks away from you, who seem so reachable, than to return to the second chapter of a five-hundred-page volume. Perhaps it is because all that studying makes me feel hungry, and that hunger turns to another type of hunger. Perhaps it is because all that silence seems so peculiar and suggestive. Or perhaps it's because of the warmth inside libraries, a warmth which makes so many people fall asleep, sprawled on top of tolerant sentences. Perhaps it's simply watching those people in the intimacy of sleep, which generally they do under covers, behind closed doors, that now I feel I've been given a privileged view of something so private, something that lovers see.

♥ Learning to ride a bike, once you have changed out of your post office uniform into something less sacred and once the saddle and the handle bars of the bicycle have been raised to their highest setting, contains the following ingredients: uncertainty, fear, perseverance, trust (in the teacher), betrayal (when the teacher first lets go of the bicycle), believe in the possibility of it, an intuitive understanding of the laws of gravity, desperation, exhilaration and plasters.

♥ It is simply a fact that some people long to travel the entire world, and do not flinch from nights in wild forests or from the heat of the desert or from the anger of a tempest. It is simply a fact that some men long to climb the loftiest of mountains, others to explore the harshness of Antarctica, others still to circumnavigate the world in hot-air balloons. Why do they do it? For the challenge, we are expected to believe. And the newspapers and the journalists will not shut up about these people. But there are other, more modest people, whom for the most part the journalists avoid, who are frightened to step out into a street. It is a fact that it is too challenging for them. They cannot do it. This latter group of people, who almost always exist in solitude, are so panicked by the world that they close themselves up inside houses, inside rooms, and never leave again. The longer they stay inside the harder it is for them to peer out; they may be brave enough at first to touch door handles but very soon it will be impossible for them to turn them.

~~Alva & Irva by Edward Carey.

A recent poll conducted by Taiwanese online music store KKBOX, which asked “Who in your mind is the number one sexiest female singer in all of Asia?”, listed Jolin Tsai at the top with 3,287 votes. Topping out the rest of the top five were Japanese singer Namie Amuro, Taiwanese singer Elva Hsiao, Japanese singer Kumi Koda, and Korean singer Hyori Lee.

Jolin was currently overseas when reached by phone through her managing company. While she stated that she was in Canada, her whereabouts for the next ten days were kept a secret, and that she’s living a life in a foreign country where “no one recognizes her”. While on the phone, Jolin expressed, “I’m happy. I’m not being filmed, and no one recognizes me.” But she has been known to be a ditz, cooking sweet noodles that are supposed to be salty, lacking any concept of numbers and money, and violating traffic laws while driving.

So how will she take care of herself in a foreign country? Her agent stated that Jolin will call on her friends living in various countries, and that she can still find people to join her to eat, watch movies, and enjoy a less hectic life. She’s also using her current activities to inspire her for her new album next year. Although she plans on returning back to Taiwan, she still hasn’t bought her return trip tickets.

Source


Wut wut? Kuu is the sexiest always. XD Though it was done in Taiwan, so not surprising I guess, lol. And is it just me or is Jolin horrifically skinny in that pic? D:

Bakemonogatari [7]
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