Q: Mommy, are we dead yet? A: Almost, sweetie, almost.

I must say, my favourite lines from Shakespeare's much-parodied loved play Romeo and Juliet has got to be these:

JULIET
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Alternative meanings aside, this is--in my humble opinion--one of the most goldarn adorable statements of the entire play...

... unless you're Mad, of course.

'Nuff said.

~Mnem

PS. Why have we not been posting like the pencil-adduced thesaurus-sniffing run-on-sentence-abusing hyphenated coffeemeisters like we are (or used to be)? Quite frankly, my dear, we don't have enough bloody time left for FerretGun in between the demands made by school and homework and more homework and preventing mutual friends from committing suicide by bagel and yet more homework and, y'know, the little expendable things on the side like sleep (such a luxury now) and food (om nom nom). We're sorry. It sounds insincere but we are. And what we are is tired sorry and redundant. Uhh... yeah.

LOOK, A PENGUIN. -books it the hell out of there-

And the incessant ramblings of people when they are thinking sanely...

-- will come to an end in Ferret Gun.

No, we aren't going to stop posting, if that is what you are thinking. No, rather, we are expanding.
Perhaps this will explain it very clearly to you:

Damn straight. Except swords can actually, you know, kill you. (No, please do not dredge up the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument - swords have the potential to kill is what I'm saying, although it'd be damn freaky as well as maybe the end of the world if they started hovering around and stabbing people in the gut in a 1-2-3 fashion that would be similar to seppuku or harakiri, etc etc yadda yadda).

Hm, reminds me of a saying. "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me." What do you think, actually? Comment if you have an opinion about these two sayings.

"Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me" vs. "The pen is mightier than the sword"

Of course, if we think about this relatively, I don't think sticks and stones can compare to a sword. ... well, the similarity is that if you're whacked by any of them, it hurts. It HURTS, dammit.

./looks at the picture again
Not that I would rather be stabbed by a ninja wielding a giant pen. Nope. Ninja ink'd be pretty neat though.
... the unfortunate medical examiner who'd have to examine my body will probably think I was murdered by a squid waving a machete around. How graceless.

Yes, breaking away from that tangent...

Mnem has established a new site which will be known as The Ink Ninjas (click click click!). As aforementioned, we will not be abandoning Ferret Gun, we are just sorting and stuffing things in places. Think of Ferret Gun as a sock drawer getting too full because we crammed it full of socks. Now think of the Ink Ninjas as another sock drawer, empty and unused. We are moving all the striped socks into the Ink Ninjas drawer. Yes? :D

The Ink Ninjas will be home to writing, writing, rants, the occasional word vomit, but mostly? Writing. They can be independent stories, one-shots, chapters of a story you're working on...

The only comments we'll allow for are those pertaining to constructive criticism or positive feedback.
... flames will only burn.

We'll kick your ass if you flame.

Seriously.

It's not nice.

And I don't know why I'm spacing everything out.

But whatever.

Main point? Don't freaking flame. Seriously. Doesn't make anyone happy.

Time to race over now! :D

If you haven't clicked on the link, CLICK ON IT NOW, DAMMIT.

SOCKS SOCKS SOCKS SOCKS SOCKS SOCKS SOCKS!

-Chronos

Mnem's new reading list. Brought to you by the BBC + dead white guys

Saw this in a friend's Facebook note, thought it looked cool, didn't dare make my own note about it 'cause she and I aren't really that close anymore and it woulda looked stalkerish, wanted to share it anyways, stole it with a fiendish laugh, deleted unnecessary line breaks and dumped it here. To wit, this is a list of 100 rather important books, of which the average person, according to the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation, has only read six. Six. For shame. There is something wrong with this generation.

Anyhoo, it is now my goal to finish reading through this list by the end of high school, which shouldn't be too difficult as a) I read like a maelstrom (case in point: finished Vonnegut's 302-page Hocus Pocus in roughly three hours last week) and b) I've already gone through quite a few of these books. Bolded Struck-out items have been read in full and italicized ones have been begun and then tossed aside or simply read in excerpt form. (And my own addition: underlined bolded ones are ones I really really reeeaaally want to read.) Feel free to snatch the list and vaunt your own literary accomplishments. No credit required, because it never was  mine anyways, but your soul would be nice.

Ho shet, a medieval story with snark

"War," said Joseph Hirkanos to the elephant. He spat on the grass ... "Bad for the Radanites."


"Not always," said his nephew, a would-be sharp operator who lacked for the satisfaction of his ambition only the quality of sharpness and who expended all of his energies, as far as Joseph could see, on preserving his opinions from contamination by experience.

Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road concerns itself with tenth-century odd couple Zelikman (rail-thin, morbid, and given to slicing up passersby with an oversized bodkin) and Amram (a veritable giant of an ex-soldier with a pleasantly obscene Viking axe and a good hand at shatranj) and what adventures the two globe-trotting swindlers run into after attaching themselves to the quest of the fugitive Khazar prince, Filaq. It's a story liberally laced with elephants, Jews, black humour, and dead men, all of which combine to make--well, it's difficult to describe, but it's very good, so I shall just say that it combines to make a swashbuckling knit-up of elephants, Jews, black humour, and dead men that is more, much more, than the sum of its parts. Trust me: it's better than it sounds.

~Mnem

Huhwaitwhat?

-blank look-

Well, since Chronos is not making any sense, I will throw GIMP at her to see if she wakes up. -grin- That, and I got distracted by the watermelons when posting a few nights back and neglected to foist my image upon ye. Shame on you all for not reminding me! -tsk tsk-

Anyhoo, here it is. Try not to run screaming from the room. It gets boring after the fifth time.

A quote from a book I'm reading right now. I swear I'm in love with Philip Marlowe. (Confused? --Well, suck it. Go look him up, I'm too lazy busy to write up a summary. -sunny smile-)

~Mnemosyne

Operation Lit-ra-tchoo-rah (part I)

Funny how I realize only now that I have never, not once, talked about books on this blog. Chronos and I both love reading and since we use FG as a sounding board for everything else in our lives it's only appropriate that we do so too for this.

Because it's my our blog and I we can write about whatever I we want, this 'un will be about our my favourite books. (Easy to confuse pronouns.) I tend to go overboard when describing books, so this'll be a five-part series--every item gets its own post. In no particular order:

1. The Millenium Trilogy by Stig Larsson
Okay, so the writing style is nothing special--the author was a financial reporter before he became, very briefly, a novelist--but the story is fking amazing. In plain and simple terms the first book is a murder mystery, the second a crime novel, and the third a courtroom drama. However, those labels don't come nearly close enough to to accurately describing these works. If you look up "genre busting" you're going to get the text of these novels as your definition.

More to the point, the reason I love these books so much is because of antisocial hacker character Lisbeth Salander. She is unforgettable. She takes every stereotype accorded to a traditional female heroine and turns it on its head. Tall, physically powerful blond Amazon? Scratch that; she's skinny, elfin, 24 years old in her first appearance but passing for a teenager without blinking an eye. Rough but happy childhood with a father/mother who continues to inspire her? Actually, she was abused from an early age by her terrifying father, wrongly institutionalized at the age of thirteen, and then declared legally incompetent and psychologically unsound. A victim who breaks down crying and needs to be rescued? Hell no! She gets (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER WON'T RUIN THE BOOK BUT WILL REMOVE A LITTLE TENSION FROM THE BEGINNING SO READ AT YOUR OWN RISK) savagely raped by her guardian in the first book--not once, but twice. And what does she do? She pops out the secret video she took of the act, breaks into said guardian's house, uses it to blackmail him into leaving her alone for the rest of her life, and (just in case we think she isn't deadly fking serious) tattoos a declaration of his crimes on his stomach in two-inch-tall blue letters.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't mess with Lisbeth Salander.

~Mnemosyne