Profile for Bats:
Ello.
I be Bats, formerly BatDyke. My profile isn't fancy, but at least it's easy to read.
I can be contacted at aki_akachan at hotmail dot com.
I'm learning Japanese (badly) and am obsessed with various animes.
It's a pixel meeeeee:
Please click the above eggs. They are levelling dragons, and I'd much rather they didn't die.
And because it was both my b3taday, and Sleepybinky's, Spangolin drew us this most awesome doodle:
And djrich thinks I'm great!
One of the great mysteries of life:
This is a funky piece MRee made for me:
Which File Extension are You?
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- a member for 18 years, 1 month and 8 days
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Ello.
I be Bats, formerly BatDyke. My profile isn't fancy, but at least it's easy to read.
I can be contacted at aki_akachan at hotmail dot com.
I'm learning Japanese (badly) and am obsessed with various animes.
It's a pixel meeeeee:
Please click the above eggs. They are levelling dragons, and I'd much rather they didn't die.
And because it was both my b3taday, and Sleepybinky's, Spangolin drew us this most awesome doodle:
And djrich thinks I'm great!
One of the great mysteries of life:
This is a funky piece MRee made for me:
Which File Extension are You?
Recent front page messages:
none
Best answers to questions:
» Beautiful Moments, Part Two
My Grandad and Grandma.
Seeing as you lot are making me extremely weepy, I thought I'd actually join in for once. I'm afraid there's no punchline or even any specific 'moments' here, but I'd like to say how much I love my grandparents.
My Grandad is amazing. He really is. He was an evacuee in the war, then he joined up to the RAF, and he worked on the Star Wars strategic defense initiative. He travelled all over the world with his loving wife in tow, to Singapore and to Kenya where my uncle was born. He's given me so much, and I don't mean in terms of crappy plastic toys. He taught me how to pick blackberries, how to put rubber band aeroplanes together, what a dinosaur is (we went so often to the Natural History museum, he had a season ticket). He showed me how to think, how to question and why grandparents are so fucking special.
My Grandma is fantastic. I'll never forget the time my Mum, me, my brother my my grandparents were sat talking in their almost stereotypically old-person living room. I don't remember what the subject was - something about the RAF - but my Grandma said, with an affectionate smile to her husband of 50 years, "Yes, he'll always be my Brylcreem boy." For a brief moment, I saw my Grandad as she must still see him: a six foot something handsome engineer, using his brains and practicality to help Britain.
She's a four foot nine 70-something old woman now, with a dodgy knee and a love for People's Friend magazine. My Grandad has weird heart arrythmias and a stooped back. But you know what? They are so much in love, even now. I can only hope they stick around to see their future great-grandkids, because I want my children to know how bloody special they both are.
Sorry for the page-long rant.
(Fri 6th Aug 2010, 9:21, More)
My Grandad and Grandma.
Seeing as you lot are making me extremely weepy, I thought I'd actually join in for once. I'm afraid there's no punchline or even any specific 'moments' here, but I'd like to say how much I love my grandparents.
My Grandad is amazing. He really is. He was an evacuee in the war, then he joined up to the RAF, and he worked on the Star Wars strategic defense initiative. He travelled all over the world with his loving wife in tow, to Singapore and to Kenya where my uncle was born. He's given me so much, and I don't mean in terms of crappy plastic toys. He taught me how to pick blackberries, how to put rubber band aeroplanes together, what a dinosaur is (we went so often to the Natural History museum, he had a season ticket). He showed me how to think, how to question and why grandparents are so fucking special.
My Grandma is fantastic. I'll never forget the time my Mum, me, my brother my my grandparents were sat talking in their almost stereotypically old-person living room. I don't remember what the subject was - something about the RAF - but my Grandma said, with an affectionate smile to her husband of 50 years, "Yes, he'll always be my Brylcreem boy." For a brief moment, I saw my Grandad as she must still see him: a six foot something handsome engineer, using his brains and practicality to help Britain.
She's a four foot nine 70-something old woman now, with a dodgy knee and a love for People's Friend magazine. My Grandad has weird heart arrythmias and a stooped back. But you know what? They are so much in love, even now. I can only hope they stick around to see their future great-grandkids, because I want my children to know how bloody special they both are.
Sorry for the page-long rant.
(Fri 6th Aug 2010, 9:21, More)
» School Assemblies
School assembly gone right, actually.
I went to a fairly scummy South London comprehensive, full of various diaspora from around those parts and as multicultural as only an inner city school can be. It was a well-meaning school overall, let down by the sheer amount of parents who simply refused to engage with their spawn and saw the secondary as a kind of nursery for teenagers. (Actually, they weren't always wrong, it did feel like that sometimes.)
Me being a socially inept teacher's pet, I queued quietly among a baying crowd of 13/14 year olds outside the converted lunch hall on a Wednesday morning, trying to calculate how to get into the hall last so I could be out of there sharpish at the end. We all filed in and I proceeded to stare at the clock for a while as the Head Of Year rabbited on about something or other. But a tension was filling the room; the normal bored mumbling had ceased and people were actually listening to the teacher. Confused, I tuned back in:
'... She was eight months pregnant, and they pushed her to the floor, forced a cattle prod into her vagina and shocked her with it until she passed out. The baby was later born prematurely and died. They did this because she wasn't married.'
Jesus. The teacher said vagina! There was a ripple of uncomfortable nudges in the hall about the phrasing, but it was clear that a sports hall full of teenagers from every year of the school had just been given the starkest depiction imaginable of human rights abuses available from a middle aged man with grey hair and ankle-swinger trousers. The silence was palpable, and all I could think about was some poor woman in Africa (I think, though I can't remember the rest of his story) being put through torture. Many of my classmates were from extremely religious countries themselves originally (Somalia, Palestine etc), was it really right to be raising something like that when opinions might differ at home? I maintain it was a bold move, but a good one.
I left the assembly intensely grateful for my own rights and freedoms and with a sense that the world was nowhere near as innocent as it was 45 minutes previously. Good job, Mr Whatever-Your-Name-Was. Good job.
(Additional: I am paraphrasing the story a little, but the details are there.)
(Wed 19th Jun 2013, 9:06, More)
School assembly gone right, actually.
I went to a fairly scummy South London comprehensive, full of various diaspora from around those parts and as multicultural as only an inner city school can be. It was a well-meaning school overall, let down by the sheer amount of parents who simply refused to engage with their spawn and saw the secondary as a kind of nursery for teenagers. (Actually, they weren't always wrong, it did feel like that sometimes.)
Me being a socially inept teacher's pet, I queued quietly among a baying crowd of 13/14 year olds outside the converted lunch hall on a Wednesday morning, trying to calculate how to get into the hall last so I could be out of there sharpish at the end. We all filed in and I proceeded to stare at the clock for a while as the Head Of Year rabbited on about something or other. But a tension was filling the room; the normal bored mumbling had ceased and people were actually listening to the teacher. Confused, I tuned back in:
'... She was eight months pregnant, and they pushed her to the floor, forced a cattle prod into her vagina and shocked her with it until she passed out. The baby was later born prematurely and died. They did this because she wasn't married.'
Jesus. The teacher said vagina! There was a ripple of uncomfortable nudges in the hall about the phrasing, but it was clear that a sports hall full of teenagers from every year of the school had just been given the starkest depiction imaginable of human rights abuses available from a middle aged man with grey hair and ankle-swinger trousers. The silence was palpable, and all I could think about was some poor woman in Africa (I think, though I can't remember the rest of his story) being put through torture. Many of my classmates were from extremely religious countries themselves originally (Somalia, Palestine etc), was it really right to be raising something like that when opinions might differ at home? I maintain it was a bold move, but a good one.
I left the assembly intensely grateful for my own rights and freedoms and with a sense that the world was nowhere near as innocent as it was 45 minutes previously. Good job, Mr Whatever-Your-Name-Was. Good job.
(Additional: I am paraphrasing the story a little, but the details are there.)
(Wed 19th Jun 2013, 9:06, More)
» Missing body parts
Not quite Tom Cruise
but my friend has just had her bubby, and she kept the placenta. Yup... in a bag. And here's a rather NSFW image of a bloody, veiny mass of flesh, muscle and whatever a placenta is made of:
www.dudeintraining.com/USERIMAGES/DSCF0809.JPG
Don't look at that while eating, guys and girls.
(Fri 2nd Jun 2006, 20:51, More)
Not quite Tom Cruise
but my friend has just had her bubby, and she kept the placenta. Yup... in a bag. And here's a rather NSFW image of a bloody, veiny mass of flesh, muscle and whatever a placenta is made of:
www.dudeintraining.com/USERIMAGES/DSCF0809.JPG
Don't look at that while eating, guys and girls.
(Fri 2nd Jun 2006, 20:51, More)
» Common
I don't like to be judgemental
since I grew up in a 'common' household, 'leccy' on a meter, bored kids breaking into cars along the street, all that. But what mystifies me is the (chavvy) women who, upon hearing their boyfriend would like to marry them, decides they want a fairytale wedding. And not a fairly tasteful affair in a small church, I'm talking Barbie Fairy Princess.
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-392107/The-25-stone-wedding-dress.html
It's not so much wanting a huge dress heavy enough to do your back in, but then wanting a tacky perspex coach to parade about in?
img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2006/09/sheridan200906_700x469.jpg
... I notice the only decent links were Daily Mail ones. Does that say something?
(Mon 20th Oct 2008, 23:03, More)
I don't like to be judgemental
since I grew up in a 'common' household, 'leccy' on a meter, bored kids breaking into cars along the street, all that. But what mystifies me is the (chavvy) women who, upon hearing their boyfriend would like to marry them, decides they want a fairytale wedding. And not a fairly tasteful affair in a small church, I'm talking Barbie Fairy Princess.
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-392107/The-25-stone-wedding-dress.html
It's not so much wanting a huge dress heavy enough to do your back in, but then wanting a tacky perspex coach to parade about in?
img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2006/09/sheridan200906_700x469.jpg
... I notice the only decent links were Daily Mail ones. Does that say something?
(Mon 20th Oct 2008, 23:03, More)