In which I use "awesome" and "amazing" far too often
"'Be what you would seem to be'- or if you'd like it put more simply- 'Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'"
The original Blob is on On Demand and I am all over that.
So it was pretty humid out, which wasn't too bad, really, but it was foreshadowing the weather we were going to have to deal with.
Pretty much the moment we left the apartment complex and got on the main road it started to rain. Really hard. By the time we got to the train station, though, it had become a light drizzle. I was hoping that by the time we got to Philly it would have stopped completely.
This was not to be the case. When we got there it wasn't bad or anything, but I wasted some time walking a couple blocks in the wrong direction (I'd never gone to that station before, and had forgot to check a map before we left). While we were walking it started to rain. It didn't rain too hard or anything, but it was still fucking annoying.
I don't know when the doors opened, but when we got there, there wasn't a line or anything to get in. So we went ahead inside and got up close, as there weren't many people in there yet. I would later remark to Allie that it's because everyone had to get out of work first.
While waiting for the show to start, Joey noticed that there was a light in the rafters, almost directly above me, swinging a lot. It made me nervous, as it felt like a Metalocalypse episode or something, where unfortunate things happen to the audience, so we started to move away from it. Next to us, though, was a group of guys who were planning to mosh. Right when Soylent Green came out, they asked everyone around them if they were going to mosh too, then widened out the pit a lot. It ended up being off center, mostly on the left side where we were standing, which got us very far away from the swinging light.
Soylent Green wasn't bad. Their music was alright, but the vocalist had a lot of stage presence to make up for it. He had really awesome hair, too. It was really long and wild. At one point towards the end, someone in the front yelled out a song for them to play, and he just pointed to the guy and was like "we already played that, you were not paying attention."
Sometime after Soylent Green finished and before Chimaira came out the light stopped moving. I was actually kinda sad that it didn't fall on someone.
When Chimaira came out the mosh pit managed to shift over to the right some which meant not having to be so conscious of the people in the pit.
Chimaira won me over immediately by having a guitarist with long red hair. It was smexy. Then they cracked my shit up with their metal cliches, because sometimes there's nothing that pleases me more than a cliché. Some of their titles made me laugh, though I don't remember them anymore, but one of the songs had a chorus that consisted of "I hate everyone" which as you know is completely lol-worthy.
Other than that, they put on a very enjoyable show and I would listen to their music under normal circumstances.
After they left these guys in front of me were looking at their feet at something I couldn't see, and I thought to myself to check the ground for guitar picks. In front of a girl on the other side of Allie was a guitar pick. I stuck my foot out in front of her, stepped on it, and dragged it over to me. It was the pick of the redhead. It was black and had a transformer symbol on it.
So then we had to stand around and wait for Dethklok to come out. A note about Dethklok:
So the show was co-created by the amazing Brendan Small. He writes all the music, and I think as far as for the TV show, plays a lot of the instruments. He voices Nathan Explosion (vo), Skwisgaar Skwisgelf (g), and Pickles (dr).
Since he obviously can't do most of the parts himself in concert, he got other people to play the parts. In the show, Dethklok is 2 guitarists, a vocalist, a bassist, and a drummer. In concert, it's Brendan Small doing vocals and playing guitar, and some dudes playing the other guitar, bass and drums. Behind them is a sheet onto which they project the band and stuff.
Me and Allie moved over from the spot in the far left and got more centered. Joey stayed where he was.
A little before they came out, you could hear Nathan Explosion talking over the speakers. I could hardly make out what he was saying because people kept talking, so this is what I caught: "Hi, this is Nathan explosion... ... ... ... jacking off... ... ... can they hear me? I said they wouldn't hear me. ... ... reading... ... reading..." Your guess is as good as mine.
So being at the concert was like being in an episode of Metalocalypse about the band playing a concert. It started with the evil council talking about their plans to turn the audience into a bunch of ugly, mutated monsters who would be unable to spend money, thus making Dethklok poor.
Then the band came out and it was awesome. Every two songs they would go off stage to get a drink or whatever, and they would show another animated vignette. At the beginning they did some educational stuff with Face Bones. At one part he talked about the different departments that Dethklok employs. He talked about the process that goes through hooking up with the band, which requires STD screening, a paternity waiver; they also have a skank screening. Then in another, he had these professors who talked about moshing, including "what is moshing?" and moshing etiquette: "If someone falls down, you help them up. If you don't, that’s called a DICK MOVE."
Other vignettes were about the band. For instance, Murderface walks off stage saying that he has to go to the bathroom ("Take a pee"). Some of the band members aren't sure what he said, so they get in the ridiculous conversation about what they thought they heard, including "raking peas," which lead to "how do you rake peas?" "I don't know, with your hands," "The pilgrims had to rake with their hands." Then into the bathroom where they talked to Murderface for a bit, and then they realized he was sitting down and he regaled them on the virtues of peeing while sitting. Then Lawyer Guy, I don't know his name, but he's awesome, comes in and is like "You guys need to go back to the concert," and Nathan's like "that concert was yesterday," and Lawyer Guy’s like "No, it's today, in fact it's right now," which, if you were a fan, you'd know would be so typical and funny.
As for the music itself, it was of course awesome. Brendan Small is awesome (I say yet again) as he 1. can play Skwisgaar's amazing guitar solos, and 2. not only sings Nathan's parts, but has to stay in sync with the animation. Because when they're playing, the screen isn't blank. It's playing music videos for all the songs. So cartoon Nathan is mouthing everything than Brendan is saying.
The first song they played was the theme from the TV show. I can't really remember, but I think that's when I got kicked in the face. How did I possibly get kicked in the face, you may ask? Just a crowd surfer who came up behind me without me expecting it, is all. Not a big deal. My face stopped hurting long before the show was over and I didn't get any bruises.
Speaking of ears, since our hearing was all messed up from rocking out, Toki's voice sounded really ridiculous, whereas everyone else's was low enough to not sound much different.
I think the next song was the birthday song for Murderface. I think this was when I got elbowed in my ear. That wasn't too bad either, though the next day my ear would periodically throb a little.
At the end of the show Brendan did this amusing conversation between the characters he voices, which I could only understand maybe 1/3 of, but it was pretty awesome all the same, because like I said BRENDAN SMALL IS AMAZING.
Other than those events, it was a fun show with pushing and almost falling and fantastic music and so much energy. For the past few days muscles in my neck and legs were sore. I hadn't been to a show like that in far too long.
After the show Joey came over to us. He'd found Toki's guitar pick on the floor. I was only mildly jealous, since Toki's not real.
I bought a cool t-shirt and we headed back home.
One the way back to the train station some girls asked us if we knew where the station was. Since we were going there we had them follow us. Joey made small talk with the girls. When he asked them if they were coming from the Dethklok show, the one who did all the talking was like "Dethklok’s gay," to which me and Allie lol’d. If that’s gay, then I’m a FLAMER.
Of the 100 hundred books on this list, I've only read 15 of them. And only 5 of them weren't for school.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Put an asterisk next to the books you'd rather shove hot pokers in your eyes than read.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien- 2/3 of them
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte- I wish I could UNread this book.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker- much too long
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare- I hate Hamlet so much
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
lol at kid Batman
ETA: OMG. So if you haven't seen Blob and want to remain spoiler free, don't read this. So they discover that the blob can't take the cold, so they freeze it with CO2 and decide to send it to the Arctic. The very last lines of the movie are:
Lieutenant Dave: At least we've got it stopped.
Steve Andrews: Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold.
and then they show some container that's holding the blob being dropped off in the middle of the Arctic, and then a question mark appears and the movie's over. And I just hardcore triangle-mouthed. Thanks to global warming, the blob can unfreeze and take over Canada! (Or Russia, whatever.)
The original Blob is on On Demand and I am all over that.
So it was pretty humid out, which wasn't too bad, really, but it was foreshadowing the weather we were going to have to deal with.
Pretty much the moment we left the apartment complex and got on the main road it started to rain. Really hard. By the time we got to the train station, though, it had become a light drizzle. I was hoping that by the time we got to Philly it would have stopped completely.
This was not to be the case. When we got there it wasn't bad or anything, but I wasted some time walking a couple blocks in the wrong direction (I'd never gone to that station before, and had forgot to check a map before we left). While we were walking it started to rain. It didn't rain too hard or anything, but it was still fucking annoying.
I don't know when the doors opened, but when we got there, there wasn't a line or anything to get in. So we went ahead inside and got up close, as there weren't many people in there yet. I would later remark to Allie that it's because everyone had to get out of work first.
While waiting for the show to start, Joey noticed that there was a light in the rafters, almost directly above me, swinging a lot. It made me nervous, as it felt like a Metalocalypse episode or something, where unfortunate things happen to the audience, so we started to move away from it. Next to us, though, was a group of guys who were planning to mosh. Right when Soylent Green came out, they asked everyone around them if they were going to mosh too, then widened out the pit a lot. It ended up being off center, mostly on the left side where we were standing, which got us very far away from the swinging light.
Soylent Green wasn't bad. Their music was alright, but the vocalist had a lot of stage presence to make up for it. He had really awesome hair, too. It was really long and wild. At one point towards the end, someone in the front yelled out a song for them to play, and he just pointed to the guy and was like "we already played that, you were not paying attention."
Sometime after Soylent Green finished and before Chimaira came out the light stopped moving. I was actually kinda sad that it didn't fall on someone.
When Chimaira came out the mosh pit managed to shift over to the right some which meant not having to be so conscious of the people in the pit.
Chimaira won me over immediately by having a guitarist with long red hair. It was smexy. Then they cracked my shit up with their metal cliches, because sometimes there's nothing that pleases me more than a cliché. Some of their titles made me laugh, though I don't remember them anymore, but one of the songs had a chorus that consisted of "I hate everyone" which as you know is completely lol-worthy.
Other than that, they put on a very enjoyable show and I would listen to their music under normal circumstances.
After they left these guys in front of me were looking at their feet at something I couldn't see, and I thought to myself to check the ground for guitar picks. In front of a girl on the other side of Allie was a guitar pick. I stuck my foot out in front of her, stepped on it, and dragged it over to me. It was the pick of the redhead. It was black and had a transformer symbol on it.
So then we had to stand around and wait for Dethklok to come out. A note about Dethklok:
So the show was co-created by the amazing Brendan Small. He writes all the music, and I think as far as for the TV show, plays a lot of the instruments. He voices Nathan Explosion (vo), Skwisgaar Skwisgelf (g), and Pickles (dr).
Since he obviously can't do most of the parts himself in concert, he got other people to play the parts. In the show, Dethklok is 2 guitarists, a vocalist, a bassist, and a drummer. In concert, it's Brendan Small doing vocals and playing guitar, and some dudes playing the other guitar, bass and drums. Behind them is a sheet onto which they project the band and stuff.
Me and Allie moved over from the spot in the far left and got more centered. Joey stayed where he was.
A little before they came out, you could hear Nathan Explosion talking over the speakers. I could hardly make out what he was saying because people kept talking, so this is what I caught: "Hi, this is Nathan explosion... ... ... ... jacking off... ... ... can they hear me? I said they wouldn't hear me. ... ... reading... ... reading..." Your guess is as good as mine.
So being at the concert was like being in an episode of Metalocalypse about the band playing a concert. It started with the evil council talking about their plans to turn the audience into a bunch of ugly, mutated monsters who would be unable to spend money, thus making Dethklok poor.
Then the band came out and it was awesome. Every two songs they would go off stage to get a drink or whatever, and they would show another animated vignette. At the beginning they did some educational stuff with Face Bones. At one part he talked about the different departments that Dethklok employs. He talked about the process that goes through hooking up with the band, which requires STD screening, a paternity waiver; they also have a skank screening. Then in another, he had these professors who talked about moshing, including "what is moshing?" and moshing etiquette: "If someone falls down, you help them up. If you don't, that’s called a DICK MOVE."
Other vignettes were about the band. For instance, Murderface walks off stage saying that he has to go to the bathroom ("Take a pee"). Some of the band members aren't sure what he said, so they get in the ridiculous conversation about what they thought they heard, including "raking peas," which lead to "how do you rake peas?" "I don't know, with your hands," "The pilgrims had to rake with their hands." Then into the bathroom where they talked to Murderface for a bit, and then they realized he was sitting down and he regaled them on the virtues of peeing while sitting. Then Lawyer Guy, I don't know his name, but he's awesome, comes in and is like "You guys need to go back to the concert," and Nathan's like "that concert was yesterday," and Lawyer Guy’s like "No, it's today, in fact it's right now," which, if you were a fan, you'd know would be so typical and funny.
As for the music itself, it was of course awesome. Brendan Small is awesome (I say yet again) as he 1. can play Skwisgaar's amazing guitar solos, and 2. not only sings Nathan's parts, but has to stay in sync with the animation. Because when they're playing, the screen isn't blank. It's playing music videos for all the songs. So cartoon Nathan is mouthing everything than Brendan is saying.
The first song they played was the theme from the TV show. I can't really remember, but I think that's when I got kicked in the face. How did I possibly get kicked in the face, you may ask? Just a crowd surfer who came up behind me without me expecting it, is all. Not a big deal. My face stopped hurting long before the show was over and I didn't get any bruises.
Speaking of ears, since our hearing was all messed up from rocking out, Toki's voice sounded really ridiculous, whereas everyone else's was low enough to not sound much different.
I think the next song was the birthday song for Murderface. I think this was when I got elbowed in my ear. That wasn't too bad either, though the next day my ear would periodically throb a little.
At the end of the show Brendan did this amusing conversation between the characters he voices, which I could only understand maybe 1/3 of, but it was pretty awesome all the same, because like I said BRENDAN SMALL IS AMAZING.
Other than those events, it was a fun show with pushing and almost falling and fantastic music and so much energy. For the past few days muscles in my neck and legs were sore. I hadn't been to a show like that in far too long.
After the show Joey came over to us. He'd found Toki's guitar pick on the floor. I was only mildly jealous, since Toki's not real.
I bought a cool t-shirt and we headed back home.
One the way back to the train station some girls asked us if we knew where the station was. Since we were going there we had them follow us. Joey made small talk with the girls. When he asked them if they were coming from the Dethklok show, the one who did all the talking was like "Dethklok’s gay," to which me and Allie lol’d. If that’s gay, then I’m a FLAMER.
Of the 100 hundred books on this list, I've only read 15 of them. And only 5 of them weren't for school.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Put an asterisk next to the books you'd rather shove hot pokers in your eyes than read.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien- 2/3 of them
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte- I wish I could UNread this book.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker- much too long
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare- I hate Hamlet so much
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
lol at kid Batman
ETA: OMG. So if you haven't seen Blob and want to remain spoiler free, don't read this. So they discover that the blob can't take the cold, so they freeze it with CO2 and decide to send it to the Arctic. The very last lines of the movie are:
Lieutenant Dave: At least we've got it stopped.
Steve Andrews: Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold.
and then they show some container that's holding the blob being dropped off in the middle of the Arctic, and then a question mark appears and the movie's over. And I just hardcore triangle-mouthed. Thanks to global warming, the blob can unfreeze and take over Canada! (Or Russia, whatever.)