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Post by RealDealSB on Jan 7, 2004 21:09:03 GMT -5
oh yah, change these colors, the blue is too bright. its not appealing. the bg pics r lacking, u can do better  |
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Post by 2 on Dec 31, 2010 15:15:09 GMT -5
On the day we had been at sea for two weeks, we rounded Cape Chelyuskin, the northernmost point in Siberia. Somewhere to starboard was Severnaya Zemlya, the Northern Land; our position was almost 78 degrees northern latitude. For more than a week, we had been enjoying the midnight sun, if you want to call it enjoyable when it doesn't get dark at night. It was biting cold: winter seemed to have returned, and the pack ice had been causing us and the other ships in the convoy a lot of trouble. Finally, at the point of entering the Kara Sea, we were stuck.
The two oblique icebreakers assigned to our convoy weren't having any trouble moving about. They were ingenious, asymmetrically built vessels that normally could open a channel wide enough for a large freighter or tanker by traveling sideways through the ice. Now, however, the strength of the pack ice forced them to move forward like regular ships, so both were needed to make the channel wide enough. The exceptional cold, combined with the slow progress of the convoy, caused the channel quickly to compress and freeze over again, and even though we were only the fourth vessel in line, the sea had already frozen around us.
"The Kapitan Fedosov may be a strong ship, but she's no icebreaker," Joel told me as we were surveying the ice. "Our computerized navigation system sees us through ice that's on the move, but here, it's frozen solid. We'll wait and see what the icebreakers will do."
Joel was watching something through his binoculars, and presently, he handed them to me and told me where to look. I searched for whatever it was, and then I spotted something that moved. A polar bear had caught a seal by pulling it out of its breathing hole, and had just begun eating his catch. The seal still looked intact, as if it had been alive. It was the first seal I had ever seen outside a zoo. Naturally, it also was my first glimpse of a wild polar bear.
"Take a good look," Joel said, when I told him this. "It may well be both the first and the last wild seal and polar bear you'll ever see. The Arctic Ocean is the only water in the world where there still are some seals left—the other oceans have been overfished and polluted, and all their marine mammals are extinct. Now the Japanese are talking about fishing from nuclear submarines under the Polar icecap, so soon there'll be no fish left for these seals, either. And when the seals go, so will the polar bears."
A little later, I spotted another bear, no doubt on the lookout for prey. I would have liked to see a bear cub, and asked Joel if there were any about.
"The cubs are still with their mothers in and around their winter lairs on the shore. They wouldn't show themselves while we're here: we make too much noise. A few months from now, we'll be able to see them on the ice, if we're lucky."
To port, we could see the Taimyr Peninsula. There were no trees, and the tundra was covered in snow. The first mate, a Russian officer, told me that there had never been any trees this far north. But further south, Siberia had used to be covered by a nearly unbroken boreal forest. It was now largely gone, due to clearcutting by foreign corporations, invited by incompetent or corrupt local officials following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Those marauders had been allowed to get away with just devastating the forests and carrying off the timber, although they had committed themselves to comprehensive forest management programs.
"Too many mistakes were made around the turn of the century," the mate concluded. "Maybe Russia could have become a democracy if somehow we could have produced officials capable of something more than just obeying orders and taking bribes. We should have pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, but, evidently, it was asking too much. In the end, big business, organized crime, and the secret services—all the same crowd, really—won, and we're again governed like we're used to being governed. You'll have to remember that Russia has never had anything other than autocratic rule during all of her thousand-year history, except for brief experiments with democracy that have all led to failure."
"But, at least, Russians are now allowed to travel, and there aren't any Gulags," I observed.
"The Communists were paranoid, and wasted their strength on trying to spread their system over the world. In one sense, the West should be more worried about today's Russia than they were about the late Soviet Union. This government is pragmatic and seeks only what's in Russia's interest. We don't subsidize anybody's revolutions or bankrupt economies like the Soviets did: all our efforts are directed toward strengthening Russia. We'll accept any foreign investments and joint ventures if they contribute to that goal. And, like Henry Kissinger pointed out long ago, a strong Russia has always tended to retake her empire, even if she's lost it during periods of weakness."
"But today, as I see it, buffer states to the west would be a useless precaution," Joel objected. "The Western European powers tried to invade Russia four times during the past three centuries, and they've realized that it can't be done. They won't try again: the only possible attack against Russia would come straight down from space, as intercontinental ballistic missiles. Russia, too, knows that her former European satellites are more useful to her as free trading partners and gateways to the EU than as subjugated and uncooperative vassals. We've seen that Russia's main efforts at reestablishing her empire have been directed south and east. I think that any further Russian expansion will go south, not west."
At that we left it: the icebreakers were back in action around us, and we were on the move again. Our course turned to the southwest, and the wind turned, too; during the next days, spring returned, and our speed settled at the seven to eight knots required for keeping our timetable. The loneliness of the East Siberian and Laptev Seas was only a memory as we entered the bustling oil and gas fields of the Kara Sea and the Yamal peninsula. Two 120,000 ton oil tankers joined our convoy, and with one and a half days to go, we passed south of Novaya Zemlya and entered the largely ice-free Barents Sea.
Inevitably, our last dinner discussion on board the Kapitan Fedosov returned to Europe and the payment system we had talked about on several occasions before.
Ilya Sergeievich wondered aloud what it was with the European leader that had made him so popular.
"I think he's creepy! He's so sly, and they say he has cold-bloodedly eliminated some of his opponents."
Dana Frost agreed, and thought she knew how people had been conditioned to be able to admire somebody like that.
"Remember, most people get their values from TV these days. I've always liked watching old movies, and I think there was a kind of turning point at some time in the sixties or seventies. Until then, the hero was always a good guy. Then somebody started introducing new values.
"The first really different programs were the massive TV serials that began with Dallas and Dynasty. The drama those serials depicted seemed larger than life because of the huge personal business interests involved. But their main attraction lay in their controversial lead characters, J. R. Ewing and Alexis Colby. These imagined individuals coined a new concept in the public mind: the admired son of a bitch.
"When Dallas was new, viewers reacted as could then be expected. They thought J. R. was a creep. They found him revolting. They positively hated him. But Dallas was formidable entertainment, and people kept on watching it. Then came Dynasty and all the other takeoffs from Dallas, and soon the familiar lead character was a household concept. Eventually, there was no resentment: the strong leader who gets stronger and wealthier by immoral means and by walking all over other people had turned into a hero.
"Action drama developed the same way. Before The Seekers, John Wayne was always a gentleman, and when right had won over wrong, he rode off into the sunset with no reward and no resentment. But your typical hard-core cop in the movies of the eighties and onwards isn't sympathetic, not by a long shot. He kills and maims with revenge written all over his face. He drives home the idea that hate and violence are legitimate means of solving problems, especially when you happen to be on the right side of the law. It seems that an entire branch of the entertainment industry has dedicated itself to getting us accustomed to seeing the antihero replace the old-fashioned, sympathetic, unselfish, true hero. I think this is the main reason people can now accept, even idolize somebody like the Leader."
"There was a similar development in comedy, as well," Dieter Braun remarked. "Modern comedians have nothing in common with true clowns and great performers such as the heroes of the silent movie. Today's comedy is removed from reality into a studio environment packed with one-liners and canned laughter. It concerns itself not with exposing human weakness as comedy used to do, but with excusing it. To make people laugh, the key ingredient is insincerity."
Soon we got back to talking about the payment system. Mike Davis wanted to know what I'd be doing for money now that I'd be having no more free meals on board, and, reluctantly, I had to admit that I didn't know.
"Maybe I'll go back to Australia, buy myself a piece of land somewhere, and grow my own food," I said, full of doubts.
Jim Frost didn't think I'd make it, either.
"Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan, gave an apt description of life in the state of nature: 'Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' Today it's harder than ever to wrench a living from the soil, because so much of it has blown away. The temperate zone has become hotter than it was until the end of the last century, and has suffered a long period of alternating floods and droughts, and with the droughts, wildfires. The result is that hardly any traditional farms remain."
"I think it's strange, though," Sheila Johnson commented, "that, once more, we're so often solitary, just like Hobbes's savages. There aren't that many people living in traditional families anymore."
Dieter attempted an explanation.
"We've learned that the task of the masses today is to borrow, spend, and consume. Because of all the automation we have access to, it's no longer essential that everybody works. Earlier, while the masses had to be kept working in order to produce wealth, the family truly was the cornerstone of society, because it was a functioning unit of production, and it kept people responsible and industrious. In fact, the traditional way of living always implied a local economic structure that extended far beyond the core family: a clan or a village comprised a number of professions, and had a considerable degree of self-sufficiency. Further, it didn't borrow outside its own boundaries, and its members traded goods and services without using money: no taxes, interest, or profits could be extracted from its internal trading.
"Big business, with the enthusiastic support of corrupt civil society, is systematically eradicating every last trace of this traditional self-sufficiency. Children spend half their waking hours on schoolwork designed to turn them into specialized consumers with no skills apart from their professions; the other half is taken up by commercialized entertainment. They learn little from their busy, disinterested parents. They learn nothing from their grandparents, disposed of, as useless, in nursing homes. Big business has purloined the interpersonal space that always served to pass on tradition: we've been rendered ignorant of everything our forebears knew, robbed of the accumulated wisdom of thousands of generations. We only know how to use what business has to sell us, and some more to handle the side effects.
"Now that the most important objective of society is to maximize consumption, families are a rather undesirable impediment. A family keeps itself occupied; its members can specialize and satisfy some of its needs by producing goods and services themselves, or by cooking their own food. It's a sad fact that the interests of business are better served by a population of lonely people. The single spend more time out of the home, they buy more just to console themselves, and they can't combine complementing skills. So they spend more money than those who are members of a family, clan, or village living together. The disappearance of the family is very much in the interest of business; consequently, mass media have long since given up portraying the traditional family as something inherently better or more desirable than being single or divorced, or cohabiting with persons of the same or opposite sex. It's called 'political correctness'; what it really is, of course, is conditioning the public to place itself at the mercy of business."
Kathy Davis had heard what she wanted to hear, and got hold of her husband to give him a big squeeze.
"See, Mike, I told you it was going to be better for us to be married! Ooooh, I love my hubby!"
I, too, had heard something I liked.
"There are still a lot of people keeping up their skills in the old crafts. What we need is that enough of them get together with traditional farmers in places where there's still soil and water, and form local communities that are to some extent self-sufficient. That'll be a good beginning. I can't be the only person in this world who objects to being marked with a bar code!"
The one property of the new payment system that I had found most offensive was that the identifying bar code was to be applied to each person's skin. This was something I couldn't abide by: it stirred up some kind of deep, ancient revulsion in my soul. I realized, though, that I wasn't going to find much sympathy for this feeling among the others: a generation so casual about tattoos and piercing wasn't likely to take exception to a simple number added somewhere on their skin.
"You'll need access to some kind of money, though," Ilya Sergeievich said. "One of the worst difficulties we had after the fall of the Soviet Union was the lack of money. Inflation was so rapid that money was practically useless. People did a lot of bartering, but it isn't enough to get an economy going."
Dieter thought for a while, and agreed.
"Prosperity only comes about by having a working payment system. Without it, everyone is on their own, more or less. But the governments of this world may well abolish cash and checks and still fail to do away with money as we've known it. They can't take away the coins people have hoarded. Paper money is worth something only as long as the central banks say so, but coins will remain usable if people want to use them. After the governments withdraw all the coins they can get their hands on, the remaining coins should, in fact, go up in value."
"People have used seashells and wampum as money, too," Sheila added. "Just about any object that's hard to forge can be used as money. I can think of stamps and gambling tokens, for example. Gambling tokens even have a casino backing them up, willing to redeem them just like the central banks guarantee their money."
So there was hope. I felt I had support from my fellow passengers, even though they didn't seem to share my reservations about the new payment system. Before we parted for the night, Dieter gave me his address and asked me to contact him when I came to Germany. On the morrow, we'd be approaching Murmansk, and breakfast would be our last time together. The others were going to take the train to St. Petersburg, while I intended to hitch a ride to Helsinki, Finland.
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Post by Bear on Jul 30, 2012 12:09:26 GMT -5
Rainfield here! This is one of those games where I give you the apprenitce names, and you choose the warrior name for them! In this game, I will give you apprentice names for each round. You will say the warrior name for the apprentice. You cannot chose a name from the books. Then, I will compare the first 5 peoplez names. I will name the winner, and they get a prize (a kit that I chose for you)! After the first three rounds are done, I will start the next three rounds. There is also the Berry reward (I know, it's a weird name), where if you guess the warrior name I'm thinking of you get three kits of your choice! If you have any questions, ask me. Here are the names.
ROUND ONE
Featherpaw
1.Featherflight, by Lavastream
2.Featherdrift, by Birchclaw
3.Featherwing, by Flamelightning
4.
5.
Wingedpaw
1.Wingedfeather, by Lavastream
2.Wingedheart, by Birchclaw
3.Wingedblaze, by Ghostsoul
4.
5.
Pearlpaw
1.Pearlsong, by Lavastream
2.Pearleye, by Birchclaw
3.Pearldream, by Ghostsoul
4.Pearlshine, by Flamelightning
5.
Rainpaw
1.Rainsplash, by Lilypelt
2.Rainfield, by Lavastream
3.Rainblaze, by Birchclaw
4.Rainfall, by Ghostsoul
5.Rainfeather, by Flamelightning
Lavapaw
1.Lavastream, by Lavastream
2.Lavagrass, by Birchclaw
3.Lavaflame, by Ghostsoul
4.Lavapool, by Flamelightning
5.
Streampaw
1.Streamdash, by Lavastream
2.Streamsquirrel, by Birchclaw
3.Streamsplash, by Ghostsoul
4.Streampool, by Flamelightning
5.
Lightningpaw
1.Lightningstrike, by Lavastream
2.Lightningfall, by Birchclaw
3.Lightningflash, by Ghostsoul
4.
5.
ROUND TWO
Gingerpaw
1.Gingerlaugh, by Lavastream
2.Gingerwave, by Birchclaw
3.Gingerburst, by Ghostsoul
4.Gingertail, by Flamelightning
5.
Edellweisepaw
1.Edellweisecall, by Lavastream
2.Edellweisespring, by Birchclaw
3.Edellweisejump, by Ghostsoul
4.Edellweisebloom, by Flamelightning
5.
Greenpaw
1.Greentalon, by Lavastream
2.Greenclaw, by Birchclaw
3.Greendash, by Ghostsoul
4.Greengaze, by Flamelightning
5.
Heatherpaw
1.Heatherstem, by Lilypelt
2.Heatherstripe, by Lavastream
3.Heatherbud, by Birchclaw
4.Heatherstream, by Ghostsoul
5.Heatherbloom, by Flamelightning
Lionpaw
1.Lionroar, by Lavastream
2.Lionflame, by Birchclaw
3.Liontooth, by Ghostsoul
4.Lionfang, by Flamelightning
5.
Beigepaw
1.Beigepelt, by Lavastream
2.Beigetooth, by Birchclaw
3.Beigeclaw, by Ghostsoul
4.Beigetalon, by Flamelightning
5.
Berrypaw
1.Berrywhisker, by Lavastream
2.Berrycloud, by Birchclaw
3.Berryleaf, by Ghostsoul
4.Berrythorn, by Flamelightning
5.
ROUND THREE
Thunderpaw
1.Thundersong, by Lavastream
2.Thunderclaw, by Birchclaw
3.
4.
5.
Cloudpaw
1.Cloudjump, by Lavastream
2.Cloudmuzzle, by Birchclaw
3.
4.
5.
Stormpaw
1.Stormflash, by Lilypelt
2.Stormleap, by Lavastream
3.Stormoak, by Birchclaw
4.
5.
Grasspaw
1.Grassbreeze, by Lavastream
2.Grassmoon, by Birchclaw
3.
4.
5.
Birchpaw
1.Birchscratch, by Lavastream
2.Birchclaw, by Birchclaw
3.
4.
5.
Leafpaw
1.Leafstorm, by Lavastream
2.Leafsun, by Birchclaw
3.
4.
5.
Orangepaw
1.Orangeflame, by Lavastream
2.Orangestream, by Birchclaw
3.
4.
5.
I'm adding another thing. I will write down 4 endings and you have to pick the last names.
ROUND ONE
briar
1.Heatherbriar, by Lavastream
2.Rosebriar, by Robinstar123
3.
blaze
1.Flameblaze, by Lavastream
2.Sunblaze, by Robinstar123
3.
wish
1.Echowish, by Lavastream
2.Skywish, by Robinstar123
3.
scar
1.Bearscar, by Lavastream
2.Lionscar, by Robinstar123
3.
ROUND TWO
pearl
1.Branchpearl, by Birchclaw
2.Wingedpearl, by Lavastream
3.Flowerpearl, by Robinstar123
field
1.Rainfield, by Lavastream
2.Valleyfield, by Robinstar123
3.
fly
1.Willowfly, by Birchclaw
2.Sparklefly, by Lavastream
3.Ravenfly, by Robinstar123
face
1.Sparkleface, by Birchclaw
2.Lightface, by Lavastream
3.Badgerface, by Robinstar123
A couple more last minute things. If you guess which three will grow up and become leaders out of the six warriors below, you get one kit of your choice. Here are the warriors that could become leaders.
ROUND ONE
Squirrelfern
Honeybird
Juniperfur
Cobaltclaw
Billiardcave
Icepelt
Lilyshine
Winner: Lavastream, with Juniperfur, Billiardcave, and Icepelt
ROUND TWO
Ternwillow
Carrotpool
Newtleaf
Sleetstorm
Robintail
Maplewing
Fishheart
Here are all the kits. In the future, I may add more.
TOMS
Heronkit
Blazekit
Hawkkit
Stonekit
Treekit
SHE CATS
Daisykit
Bluekit
Elmkit
Wavekit
Mouskit
SPECIAL KITS
Firekit (tom)
Mosskit (she cat)
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