(BT:)
...At least on here. ;)

There is never really a good time to do things like this, but after being prodded enough by my associate and myself, Riss has finally finished setting up our group community on Livejournal. Behold!

ark_of_eden

The profile contains a handy user's manual, plus an interests list that we have discussed and cross-edited until it seemed a somewhat decent picture of ourselves.

(R: Just a reminder that we've had a community structure for a while now on Dreamwidth.)

This journal will no longer be updated as such, but we expect it to get good mileage yet by way of group posts made to the community or, possibly, comments. Posts will no longer be found here, though.

(R: If anyone wonders why I started moving toward a system community at all, it's because I recognized the fact that I am a control freak and that, at some point in the past, I laid claim to all of our "collective" accounts such that I felt compelled to sanitize, edit, censor, and otherwise dominate anything produced for such places. The move is something I wanted to do to try and unhook my claws from our public presentation online.)

Let us hope that the future will be better for all of us, friends. :) Please do come over and permit our house to be your house!

(R/D: Or our ark to be your ark. ^^)

(Riss:)
So I hurt myself sort of badly during weightlifting PT recently, to the extent that I can't lift my hands above my waist without pain going all up our arms. Most of our back is completely frozen up and I even managed to screw up all my upper body joints, even down to individual knuckles. At least I am capable of being incredibly thorough and hardcore at something, even if it is just me damaging myself while being a huge people-pleasing retard.

Thus, I have to sit up because I have two heating pads wrapped around our torso and if I lie down (according to the directions) the heating pads may overload and catch on fire, and that would be a fairly embarrassing way to die. In the end, I finally find myself at a point where I can make the Catch-Up Post that I haven't been able to make for months.

( Key events from around July 2011 to the present. May include some Woo elements in vague form. (Mild angst content, but I am working to keep it light.) )

That was relatively painless. :) I've been moving the heating pads around while writing, and that's cleaned up a good bit of the misery. Time to sleep now, though~

--Riss.

Sweet heaven, it truly is awkward, updating this thing by phone.

I have a completely out of context question that I have wanted to ask for quite a long time, but, things being the way they are, I've not had the opportunity until now. (If you wonder how we are, then I will say that Riss is sick--or the body is sick, and Riss is stuck out where he can feel it--and while that is unfortunate, Fate has contrived somehow to permit he and I to spend quite a lot of time together. I call it a success overall, though my poor friend is medicating himself rather heavily, by local standards.)

Please tell me, does it cause more spam, or other unfortunate Internet attention, if one responds to spam?

The Dragon wonders this also; I was merely the lucky one who successfuly snared the phone.

We get quite a bit of all sorts of spam, and in the spirit of welcoming equanimity I have always wanted to give them the same attention as other comments I receive. Riss pitches a fit when I try to answer, though, as he says that they can know when their messages receive responses and will send even more. I do understand why one should not click on any links, for fear of communicable tech diseases, but there is usually still a message around the links that the Dragon and I would be quite delighted to answer.

To share a little: I once received a teasing "crush" confession on my Formspring that attempted to lure me to a Christian singles site, while the Dragon--the only one of us who has no gender or sexual interests--recently received a link to a website that sounded like the Internet bulk clearinghouse for anal porn. (We agreed that they must have been trying to send that to Riss. The mistake is understandable when folk simply send things to our group labeled "Occupant.")

Dangerously curious animals wish to know. Meanwhile, I think often of the people here and have been trying to get Riss' help in researching ways that the Dragon and I might be able to update our presences more easily, say by Twitter or some other such lightweight Internet service. We do miss being around. <3

--Blind Tiger.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

(Riss:)
...I have the best intentions. I blame the rest of the world for this one.

I got hit with an emergency tasking for work about a week and a half ago and have been scrambling around since then trying to get emergency training and emergency packing and emergency buying things I thought I had but I guess I don't (or can't find them when I need them). It's technically a deployment--I get to go to the National Training Center in Ft. Irwin, CA, for a month and attempt to evaluate people who outrank me. It's weird and awkward and kind of doesn't make much sense. I attempt to look on the bright side and remind myself that at least I'm an evaluator and not an evaluatee, for the people actually doing the operations out in the godless butthole of America big Mojave Desert crater get to sleep on the dirt under improvised shelters, mostly, while I get to sleep in a barracks.

But somehow we're supposed to get everywhere by HMMWV, and no one is feeding us, and we're explicitly forbidden from leaving Ft. Irwin, which I understand is nearly or exactly as small and isolated as Ft. Leonard Wood. So I just now finished packing a huge amount of luggage, which is huge because I put all kinds of consumables in it--office supplies and batteries and things, as sadly there was no room for a civvie food stash T_T--on the off chance that I will never see a PX for the entire month.

People told me, "Bring stuff to do." If I truly end up so idle, then I could live with rummaging in dumpsters for scraps (or maybe beg at intersections in uniform--"STARVING L.T. - WILL LEAD AND MOTIVATE FOR FOOD"). So I brought stuff to do. Originally, I was going to swear off reading anything, as I have become dangerously addicted to novels since I've been here, but then it occurred to me that it's easier to pick up and put down a book than it is to turn the creativity switch on and off, so I brought the ereader with something like a hundred Black Library books on it, at least half of which I've already read in dead-tree form.

...I don't know how I got them. They just appeared. c_c

To conclude with a point: 1) people die at NTC, since it's a simulated overseas deployment and astonishingly stupid shit happens, like people getting run over by tanks while inside another vehicle, and 2) I thought I was going to be able to find a way to get Net access, but it looks like I'll be limited to whatever I can manage with my smartphone. Probably just reading, most likely, and mayyyyybe possibly doing short responses, or maybe even posting incoherently with lots of misspelled words if I manage to get sick/sleep-deprived/overcrowded and attempt to verbally chew my own leg off like an animal stuck in a trap. Thus, it's possible that I may be close to completely unavailable from now until the end of next month, or I could get hit by a misplaced arty round and never appear again among the living. o_o

So, in the meantime, I still love everyone here, and I wish that I could actually be around more instead of just talking about it all the time--which includes having time to let the others do what they want on the Net, as I hate how they have to get dragged along into whatever I do. ;_; If the worst happens, I wish everyone the very best in the future.

For now, I think I'm rambling a lot due to being sleep-deprived and I have to get up at 1AM to finish everything and pray that no one breaks into my place while I'm gone (never did set up the security system) and pray also that the cab I booked online actually makes it here on time so I don't have to drive my car to post and leave the poor thing out in the elements for the next month. Stupid movement plan...

(BTW, Yuuuuuuuu: Got your files. They even work on the ereader. I think I'm on Ch.17 now? Wish I could say more, but my brain is leaking out my ears. XP)

--Riss.

(Riss:)

Be unborn, Mother--
Be reversed,
     depart from the grip of Time.
Swallow yourself,
     and in yourself be nurtured--
Be the cradle of your own flesh,
     your own sky of bones;
Be alone the secret river of your breath.
Within--
     the hand of God
     is left to clutch,
          impotent,
          the atmosphere within you--
God calls
     and cannot speak your name;
God summons
     and you stir not in your sleep.
Mother,
     I know you where the violets grow,
          where the stars light up the dark between themselves.
I know you as purple and black,
     the royalty of bruises blooming;
I know you to be red, red, red--
     a scream,
     a spreading wound,
          dye on fabric in the streetlamp's glare.
You are no-color; you are crystal;
     you are the tears that are the vehicle of souls,
          bearing fury, 
          bearing grief, 
          bearing joy.
Be violet, Mother,
     be the color of the outside,
     the spaces that do not belong,
          the emptiness that is between.
I will look for you there--
     I will climb the cigarette-smoke ladder
          into the lone bare bulb on the ceiling;
     I will look for you on the spirit-streets,
          in soul-sewers with cold-eyed Guides and empty echoes--
Stray-Dog will find you,
Gutter-Crow brings word of you,
Plague-Rat tasted you, once,
     the crimson of you that you lost
          in a cluttered alley by the bar.
Mother, I am walking
Mother, my shoes are worn,
     and my shirt is thin against the cold.
My drum is in my footsteps.
My rattle is in my lungs.
Mother, I pray for you.
I am following the streetlamps
     to the place where vultures circle on the skyline.
I hope to meet you there.
In my pocket is a picture of you smiling--
     a picture of a girl without a face.
When I see you, I will know you,
When I meet you there.

-------------
Transcribed from longhand, soon to be crossposted to ark_lights and bone_rosary @ DW.

I am branching out into different liquid inks. Back when I was trying to find a new brand to use in the longhand journals, I wrote poetry with various types of blue in our (most recent) poetry notebook, so the poor thing had already become a kind of ink gallery by accident; today I was putting new ink orders together and had to try out a couple Noodler brand inks to see if they did anything for me. Thus, there is a shorter poem before this one written in Dragon's Napalm, which is indeed the brightest orange I can imagine without drifting into actual neon. I had gotten a bottle of Nightshade in the hope that it would be a deep, rich purple and thus good for pulling at buried parts of my brain, but sadly it's an extremely dark plum, more like brown with a touch of red-purple added. Oh well.

I hadn't meant to do much with the poems except dump some stream of consciousness so I could look at a mess of text of a certain color, and indeed the first poem is kind of a random jumble of Edenic and shamanic imagery. This second one surprised me.

Today: Susan Ching, shamanism, urban dystopia.
Perhaps tomorrow: Astartes, genocide, cake with strawberries.
Then next week: Pokemon, theology, post-scarcity gradeschool education.

Or something like that?

( We live and live and live. (shorter than usual) )

--Riss(+background).

(Mostly Ye Auld Fronter:)
It's been forever since I've been online consistently. There was a stretch a while back when my post housing Internet was completely crapped out for two weeks and could not understand how to make a connection happen. Just last week was a five-day FTX (field training exercise, which is all about going out into the wilderness to Embrace The Suck(TM) because there is insufficient suck to be found in civilized places and thus the Army must send us out into the forest to quest for more of it), and this weekend has been all about rushing to battle the other fifty people on my housing floor for the three washers and three dryers so we can get all our gear cleaned for a layout on Monday. As usual, I seem to be coming down with something as a result of all the crud in the field, so despite my best intentions I haven't been doing much since Friday night except attempt to wash and dry five loads of laundry and sleep.

People seem intrigued by my semi-immunity to CS (tear/riot) gas. Probably I should have predicted it, but as a necessary Chem Corps hazing ritual our cadre sergeant dropped gas at the doors of all the plywood huts that we were sleeping in on the last night of the FTX. I was That Guy who had already packed my gear for departure the previous evening and thus had my mask buried in the middle of my duffle bag with lots of junk on top of it. My hut was up earlier than the others, so when we heard the grenades banging against the door and the pop-n-hiss, we were not surprised (or not as surprised as we could have been, at least). It seems that the other guys were mostly still asleep and didn't wake up until their sinuses started swelling shut, at which point there was a hilarious stampede for their respective back doors. The others started freaking out and scrambling for their masks, while I just sighed and grabbed my duffel and walked out the back to rummage grumpily through its contents while white trails of gas were creeping around the sides of the building from the grenades out front. I was thoroughly chill on account of my transcendent crankiness, as my thoughts were going something like this: "Man, three hours of sleep, and all I wanted to do this morning was take a refreshing leak and pack my stuff and get out of here but NOOOOOO now there's GAS and my packing plan has been DAMN INCONVENIENCED and even if I get this mask on the CS will crystallize on my clothes and everything else because it's coming through the fucking windows and now I have to WASH EVERYTHING and not just SOME THINGS and RRRRRR FFFFFFFFF etc. etc."

Everybody afterward was all, "Wow, you totally didn't care about getting gassed! That was awesome!"

( A brief section touching on my headsickness. )

I am still catching up on everything. Unfortunately, life is still not in the clear for us, because our mom is flying in on Wednesday and I graduate CBOLC on Friday and immediately after graduation (meaning Friday afternoon or something) post housing will terminate my room assignment, so we must immediately begin driving to Colorado. We plan to arrive maybe Saturday afternoon. The fun part about all of this is that I've had no contact from my receiving unit yet. I got some contact info for the S-1 (personnel officer) of the BCG that I'm supposed to be attached to, but shit got so busy that after having an email bounce and having two phone calls ring into infinity I honestly couldn't find more time to spend trying to get to these people. Our mom mailed us my copy of The Army Officer's Guide a couple weeks ago so I could read up on this situation, and it turns out that I'm supposed to have a sponsor officer in my unit who should have contacted me at least sixty days ago and should have been my resource for tiny, annoying details like "Who the hell do I report to?" and "Who is actually my boss?" and "What is actually my job?" and "Is there anything stupid I should know about PT, including where it is and whether I have to wear a retarded orange vest over my uniform?"

So I assume that we will be driving in with no clue at all, getting the housing people to give me permissive TDY so our mom and I can go find a lair for us, and in between looking at apartments and getting my household goods unpacked and hitting up IKEA, FURNITURE STORE OF CHAMPIONS, I will also be sneaking around and trying to find out all that vitally-important job info on the sly somehow so I can save face and be able to pretend that I totally knew it all two months ago.

...US Army Officership: Where Every Day is a New Kick in the Nuts Adventure!! :D :D

For now, I need to go check my laundry again to see if there's a couple dryers empty. It looks like I probably won't sleep much tonight on account of the ongoing washer/dryer resource battle, so perhaps I will make transcriptions into the Woofilter or something else that I can do with a funky head cold and lingering sleep-dep from the field.

We all are hoping that everyone has been alright while we've been gone. Many hearts for all of you. <3 <3 <3

--etc. and alles.

We lived. That is AWESOME. And now I have an exam tomorrow. T_T

(And there was VX, BTW. I had this odd sort of transpersonal experience while standing near it--I'd found a spill in a mockup contaminated area and sampled it, then there were all these other procedures that we were doing on how to take more detailed samples. I realized that I'd been standing for 15 minutes or more right next to a puddle of this stuff, which looked entirely innocent, practically like water. It was horrifying, exhilarating, and morbidly fascinating all at the same time. o_o)

I'm still glad that I said everything, particularly since we are hardly ever around. I hope everyone's still doing well.

--n+alles.

I've been going back and forth over whether to actually post about this or not, since I can't settle on being either honestly concerned or just kind of brushing it off. There are some people in my class who have been quietly freaking out about it, so...maybe if I cover all the bases it'll boost my luck a little more.

We go in early tomorrow for live nerve agent training, which consists of little more than the class getting sealed up in protective gear and standing in a room for about 45 minutes with Sarin everywhere. (This is an improvement, as I'd originally thought that they were using VX, which is something like ten times as lethal as Sarin.)

Judging from what we've been told about the proceedings, it seems like this is C-BOLC's particular test of courage/gut check; even given my fairly limited experience with military schools, it's becoming quite clear that there's at least one such event for every major chunk of training that you do. Generally, it's something amazingly pointless that is carefully designed to push a lot of psychological buttons (common phobias, for instance) such that one must crush primitive, survival-oriented parts of one's cognition to complete tasks as ordered.

It...should really be entirely safe, given that they run people through this every couple of months or so. Surely, all the seals on the equipment have to be triple-checked... However, our classes have made certain that we know that we have no more than two minutes after exposure to get an antidote before suffering permanent nerve damage, and if we are extra special unlucky then we'll be dead in less than ten minutes. I understand that asphyxiation is actually a rather peaceful way to go, given the blackout before expiring, but the convulsions and vomiting that come before that would just be damn unsatisfying.

BT and the Dragon have been quipping variants of "I'm too cool/destined for greatness to die this way, so I'm sure we'll survive," so clearly they're not too concerned. I suppose I think too much about these things and/or have a greater fear of Murphy's vengeance, because I have this suspicion that if I decided not to worry then of course if anyone's seals failed tomorrow then they'd be mine, and then I'd die without even saying goodbye to anyone.

So, this probably won't be necessary, but... I'm glad I knew everybody here. I wish I could have known everybody better. I'm sorry for not being around more or being more involved in other ways, and I'm sorry if I ever made anyone feel bad, or if I said something that I shouldn't have or kept silent when you needed to hear someone. I hope that everyone will have good, happy lives full of good people and things that bring peace and fulfillment. I love everybody, even if I'm always terrible at saying or showing it, and I wish that I had had more time to be with you and learn from you.

I think that should be okay...? Probably we'll be fine; it's just that it would suck to be wrong and to have not done this. ^^;; (Damn, we don't have a will either.) Take care, everyone.

--n. (&D&BT&S)

We've been offline for several days now due to the drive to Missouri and set-up rush for the Army Chemical Corps officer training. While the Internet seems to be working now, other attendees report instability that may be chronic (or maybe they just live in shittier dorms than I do, who knows), and since we're on post there may be a chance of sites getting blocked if they seem to be too exciting. Combined with the workload, I have no idea how much any of us will be around from now until early November, which is when the course ends; after that, though, is another move and rapid set-up and suddenly having a new job possibly involving hazardous substances, so...yeah. :/

...I wish I had something more excellent to say, since this is not really a goodbye and more just a "I have no idea what the fuck is going on anymore" sort of thing, but the first two days of inbriefing and processing have somehow been enough to wipe me out. I'm sorry, and this sucks for us as well. We apologize in advance for missing anything important. :(

--alles.

It may be the classical Satan, the one so identified from the Christian culture. Then upon identification of the deific mask (symbolized energy) the individual may seek spiritual ascension by utilizing a ritual practice, ensorcelling belief; i.e. using inspiration to activate the primal or subconscious to actually inducing change and progression in the self. This will later manifest itself in a spiritual experience which can align the Luciferian to a spiritual association, a communion in which the Adversary is found manifesting in some form within the spirit and body. This would be a Theistic association, but is not limited to merely this aspect. Some have little spiritual "antennas" and will relate from an Atheistic point, viewing the Adversary as only aspects of the self. No matter HOW it is approached, it is equally as powerful once the investment of belief is found.

There were no humans, would Gods appear with the same attributes to anything else? What I am pointing to is that such deific masks of energy hold specific aethyric and chthonic attributes which play out in nature--storms, earthquakes, volcanos, hurricanes can be considered a result of the chaotic and equally needful energy of Typhon-Set, Ahriman or such.

We have just started reading a digital copy of The Bible of the Adversary by Michael Ford, founder of the Order of Phosphorus and related sub-institutions. (BT recently took advantage of his ascendancy to mine Lulu for a few cheap Ford PDFs and to download a truly enormous collection of free documents by the Order of Nine Angles, a more controversial Luciferian/Satanic association to which Ford once belonged.)

( Summary: Luciferians, please use your words more gooder. (And have more interesting sex.) )