This is Ahri before Ahri was cool

Ahri is a character from the online arena game, League of Legends.  She’s based loosely on an Asian mythical nine-tailed fox, that depending on which country you’re asking, has variations on its story.  Most of them depict the nine-tailed fox as an evil creature, mostly utilizing deception, trickery, and/or seduction to commit its evil deeds.  But since the design of the character is so leaning towards Korean in appearance and clothing, I’m lead to the belief that it’s a Korean iteration, the character is loosely based around.

I have this book of translated Korean fairy tales, that a cousin got for my sister when I was young that I somehow came to inherit.  It’s full of entertaining stories and a glimpse of culture differences, but one of the stories dealt with the nine-tailed fox.  And as is the case with most stories involving the nine-tailed fox, it’s evil, and it’s out to kill shit.  But the origins are essentially the same; girl is killed by the nine-tailed fox, nine-tailed fox takes the form of the girl, starts wrecking shit up.  In this story, Ahri kills horses and eats their livers, before killing her parents eventually.  Her brother is eventually the one who kills her, and in the aftermath the true form of a corpse of a fox with nine tails is discovered.

But the above imagery is a stark contrast to the sexified Ahri that’s available to play in LoL today.

I don’t know why I’m at work, so I’ll muse about 2011

I’m pretty sure I can count on one hand just how many people are in this office today.  Granted, I’m not complaining at the fact that I’m getting paid to sit here and do absolutely no work, but man, I certainly wouldn’t have minded sleeping in this morning.  But instead, I trudged out of bed at 6:30 a.m. to go run around the ‘hood in 36 degree weather, and here I sit, waiting for a few hours to pass, since I made it all the way out here already.  So with that in mind, and since I’ve pretty much seen the entire work-safe internet now, I suppose it’s not a bad time to sit back and catch up on some writing.  And with the end of the year literally right around the corner, why not use that as a topic?

Since I’m at the office, and don’t ever visit my own sites on the network for paranoid fear that they’ll one day find my online identity, I’m musing most of this based on what I can remember off the top of my head.  But the good news is that, as a whole, I don’t think that the encapsulated 2011 year was a very bad year at all.  Compared to 2010, it was a much improved year.  At first blush I want to say that it wasn’t anything magnificently spectacular, but the more I think about it, I guess I can say that 2011 was a pretty decent year overall.

Continue reading “I don’t know why I’m at work, so I’ll muse about 2011”