Journal about To Build a Fire By Jack London

The title itself implies that the story is more of a manual on how to build a fire than it is a tale with many lessons. The story’s deep description, symbolism, and purposeful diction all contribute to its strong portrait of the dominance of nature.
The first lines paint a vivid picture of a cold gray scene. The man, as he is always described, has no name and therefore can be interpreted as the reader or someone the reader knows or I don´t know. Also, without a name, the man does not represent individuality, but is a symbol for all men relying on fact over instinct. The man is a mathematical, scientific thinker; he follows the enlightenment ideals that science is the answer to everything. This is the only point in the story where Jack London seems to make any judgment on the man or his way of thinking. London focuses his point that the man never thought more of things than their scientific basis, never conjectured further thought or facts significance.
In almost the complete opposite of the man, his dog carries a vital role in the story. The dog represents a reaction to the situation, unlike the man who depends on technology. The dog uses its fur coat as natural protection from the cold. The dog represents a voice of reason in the story, it tries to warn the man of the dangers he encounters, waiting until its own life is in peril before leaving the man for the other.

Nature is described as the dominant force in the story, but it is never shown to actively attack the man. The wilderness would have been just as cold if the man had never walked along the trail; nature made no malicious act. The man’s own mistakes lead to his conflicts with the environment behind him. The man, in his hurry to save his own life, failed to notice the implications of his actions and eventually caused his own demise.
“To Build a Fire” is a descriptive and informative tale that focuses on the powers of nature and instinct. Jack London tells a story of the common man in nature.
Mike Gutierrez.

The Martyrs (Awesome Movie)

Well guys last week i saw this movie and it seemed to me WOW! and thinking about that. i give u the synopsis of the movie and i recommend it.

THE MARTYRS

Lucie, who has been missing for over a year, is found hysterical by the side of the road. She leads police to the derelict slaughterhouse where evidence suggests she was held captive. Although there is no evidence of sexual abuse, Lucie bears the signs of repeated injury and neglect. Traumatized and uncommunicative, Lucie is unable to tell the authorities anything further about her time in captivity or the people who kept her there.

Over time, Lucie makes friends with Anna, another girl in the youth home where she lives. Anna looks after Lucie and eventually gains her trust. Lucie appears to be haunted by something or someone - a shadowy, rasping female figure who apparently mutilates Lucie. After one such episode, Lucie makes Anna promise not to tell anyone about the creature haunting Lucie.

At this point, the film moves ahead 15 years, and shifts its attention to the Belfond family. Mom is fixing a sewer line in the yard, Dad is making breakfast, and son Antoine and daughter Marie are wrestling over a love note Antoine received. As everyone sits down to breakfast, the doorbell rings - it's Lucie, who shoots the father to death with a shotgun. The mother follows in short order, and then Lucie hesitates, asking Antoine how old he is and if he knew what his parents have done. When she doesn't get an answer, she kills Antoine. Marie hides upstairs, but Lucie finds her and kills her as well. After killing the family, Lucie's creature reappears and tries to attack Lucie. Lucie explains that she's "killed them", and so the creature can leave her alone now. The creature continues to attack her.

Panicked, Lucie calls Anna to come and help her. Anna, horrified, sees what Lucie's done and asks if she's sure these are the people who kidnapped her. Lucie is sure. Anna starts working on burying the bodies when Lucie has to deal with the creature again. In the process of moving bodies, Anna discovers that the mother is still alive and attempts to smuggle her out of the house. Lucie discovers this and beats the mother to death with a hammer. This is followed by one more attempt to placate the creature, as Lucie shows the creature that the mother is dead.

The creature embraces her gently, and begins to cut into her arms. Anna sees Lucie cutting herself - the creature is something Lucie is hallucinating. Flashbacks reveal that the creature is a woman who was being tortured in the same building as Lucie. When Lucie was able to escape, she had an opportunity to take the woman with her, but did not and has been haunted by it ever since. In a fit of rage and sadness, Lucie cuts her own throat.

Anna brings Lucie's body into the house, cleans it and wraps it in cloth. In cleaning up the house, she notices a hole in the wall behind a cabinet. Anna opens the cabinet and discovers a hidden staircase leading down. Anna discovers an underground complex decorated with pictures of people in extreme suffering. Exploring further, Anna discovers another woman, naked and chained to a wall with a metal blindfold riveted to her head. She frees the woman and takes her upstairs. Anna attempts to bathe the woman and she resists, and after Anna removes the blindfold, the woman runs off, finds a knife and begins to mutilate herself, attempting to cut off her arm.

As Anna tries to stop the woman, the woman is killed by a shotgun blast. A group of people have entered the house, and they take Anna down into the hidden complex. An older woman (referred to only as "Mademoiselle") explains to Anna that they are not interested in victims, but martyrs - the act of martyrdom brings about transcendence and the possibility of seeing into the afterlife. They are, in essence, creating martyrs through systematic abuse in the hopes of learning what lies after death from their accounts as they achieve transcendence. They kidnap young women because young women seem to be especially likely to achieve a transcendent state. Anna is then rendered unconscious.

Anna wakes up chained to a chair similar to the one discovered in the building where Lucie was kept. She is fed some sort of unpleasant gruel and methodically beaten. This goes on for several days until a badly battered Anna loses the will to resist. She hears Lucie's voice in her head, telling her that it is going to be okay, that she won't suffer much longer. Anna is then brought to an operating theater, where she is strapped into a rotating rack and flayed.

A now-skinless Anna is hung by a rack under hot lights. The people attending her remark on her considerable resilience, noting that she is still alive. The woman feeding Anna notices something about her has changed, and she calls Mademoiselle to tell her that Anna is close to transcendence. Mademoiselle hurries over and arrives in time for Anna to give her an account of what she had witnessed.

The next day, a large number of wealthy older people arrive at the house, and Mademoiselle's assistant (Etienne) announces that Anna - only one of four young women to successfully achieve martyrdom - was the first to provide an account of the world beyond life, and Mademoiselle was present to hear her account and would be sharing it with the assembled people shortly.

Mademoiselle appears to be getting ready as Etienne speaks to her through the door, asking if the announcement means that Anna saw something, and Mademoiselle says that she did, and it was clear and precise. Mademoiselle asks Etienne if he could imagine life after death. Etienne says he could not. Inside, Mademoiselle is sitting on the edge of a bathtub, where she takes a gun out of her purse. She calls to Etienne and tells him to continue doubting before shooting herself in the head.

The movie ends with Anna, lying in some sort of medicated bath in the underground complex, looking at something very far away, fading to black, and a definition of "martyr" which indicates the derivation from the Greek word for "witness."

Journal about Metaphores and War by George Lakoff

Metaphores can kill everything

According to the story, one of the most central metaphors is that A Nation Is A Person. It is used hundreds of times a day, every time the nation of Iraq is conceptualized in terms of a single person, Saddam Hussein. The war is not being waged against the Iraqi people, but only against this one person. Ordinary American citizens are using this metaphor when they say things like, "Saddam is a tyrant. He must be stopped”. What the metaphor hides, of course, is that the 3000 bombs to be dropped will not be dropped on that one person. They will kill many thousands of the people hidden by the metaphor, people that according to the metaphor we are not going to war against.
One of the most frequent uses of the Nation as Person metaphor comes in the almost daily attempts to justify the war metaphorically as a "just war." The Estate as Person metaphor is pervasive, powerful, and part of an elaborate metaphor system. This metaphor comes with a notion of the national interest: Just as it is in the interest of a person to be healthy and strong, so it is in the interest of a Nation-Person to be economically healthy and militarily strong. The International Community, peopled by Nation-Persons, there are Nation adults and Nation children, with maturity metaphorically understood as industrialization. The children are the developing nations of the third world.
There are individual people trying to maximize their "gains' and "assets" and minimize their "costs" and "losses." For a country's "assets" included its soldiers, materiel, and money. The "losses" there was no careful public accounting of civilian lives lost, people maimed, and children starved or made seriously ill by the war or the sanctions that followed it. According to the Rational Actor Model, countries act naturally in their own best interests preserving their assets, that is, their own populations, their infrastructure, their wealth, their weaponry, and so on.
We really need a new Story and new metaphors. That and globally connected communities, new leaders, and, yes, the shortcut of money.
“Perhaps Lakoff thinks that coming up with new metaphors is too hard, a job for poets that we cannot reasonably demand, nor can we wait for. If not metaphors and facts, what's left? Values! Values apparently can do what facts cannot. But isn't it a common folk theory of progressives that "The values will set you free!" If only you can get all the real values out there in the public eye, then every feeling person will reach the right conclusion.” Quote by D. Weinberger.
I want to believe that. And yet I also have seen that the same values, the same human responses to suffering, result in radically different political outcomes. The same clips of the injured Iraqis in hospitals are used to dissuade us from war and to show us how compassionate we are towards the handful of unintended victims.

Mike Gutierrez.

Silkroad online

One of the most amazing games.

Silkroad Online (Korean: 실크로드 온라인) is a fantasy MMORPG set in the 7th century AD, along the Silk Road between China and Europe.[4] The game requires no periodic subscription fee, but players can purchase premium items to customize or accelerate gameplay.

Silkroad Online is noted for its "Triangular Conflict System" in which characters can select from the three jobs of trader, hunter, and thief to engage each other in player versus player combat. Thieves attack traders who are protected by hunters. Hunters kill thieves getting experience to level up to a higher level of hunter. Traders complete trade runs to get experience to level up to a higher level of trader, and thieves kill traders and hunters to level up. Thieves can also steal goods dropped by traders to take to the thieves' den to exchange for gold and thief experience.
In the Legend I update for Silkroad, the European classes and areas were introduced to the International servers. In Legend II, Fortress War was introduced to the players of iSRO. In fortress war, guilds fight to take hold of a fort which gives them the ability to raise taxes and hold some prestige over other guilds. In Legend III, Roc Mountain and 90 cap were introduced, as well as 9th Degree Armor and Weapons for both races. In Legend III+, the Bandit Fortress was added to iSRO, as well as Devil's Spirit silk dress.
Players are given the option to create either a Chinese or European character. Each of the races has its own advantages, disadvantages, cities, weapons, armor and classes.