#limaria

[voca-song-a-day]

Today's featured song is: "Arcane" by Limaria feat. MAYU!

[animalids]

Hemphill's file shell (Limaria hemphilli)

Photo by Robyn Waayers

[animalids]

Flame shell (Limaria hians)

Photo by David Borg

[violettranslations]

Ophelia

私の声が貴方を誘う 微睡む夢の世界で二人は出会う 僅かな刻が 永遠になる 揺れ動く景色がまた私を満たす My voice beckons you. Inside this drowsy dream world, we meet. This meager slice of time becomes eternal. The swaying landscape fills me once again. 遠くに見える朝日が眩しくて 夜明けの儚さに怯えて泣いた The distant morning sun was so radiant that I grew frightened of the transience of the dawn, and wept. 横目に見渡す 退屈な日々を 空っぽの部屋に残る温もりで満たす I examine these tedious days out of the corner of my eye and fill them with the warmth left in an empty room. 貴方の声が光を灯す 目覚めの刻のような静かな場所へ その指先に絡めとられて 私はまた夢の続きに堕ちてゆく Your voice shines a light. It points towards a quiet place, as if bringing me to the hour of awakening. Entangled by your fingertips, I again fall into the continuation of a dream. 沈みゆく日の光 また独り 暗闇に溺れて 虚空に手を伸ばす I’m alone once more in the light of the sinking sun. Drowning in the darkness, I reach out my hand to empty space. 涙の川に沈む私の心は 二度と戻れない場所へ魂を繋ぐ My heart, sinking in a river of tears, connects my soul to a place I can never return to. 貴方の声が終わりを告げる 眠りに堕ちたような静かな時を 刻み続けてまた繰り返す 明けない夜を紡いで永遠になる Your voice heralds the end. As if fallen into slumber, it keeps on marking out a quiet time, repeating again and again. In weaving an unending night, it becomes an eternity. 二人の声が虚空に響く 微睡む夢の世界に貴方を繋ぐ その指先が優しく包む 私はまた夢の続きに堕ちてゆく Our voices resound through empty space. I connect you to this drowsy dream world. Your fingertips gently envelop me. I again fall into the continuation of a dream. 誰かの声が遠くに響く 失われた記憶を呼び起こすような 花の王冠が私に告げる 二度と目覚めること無き夢の続きを Someone’s voice resounds in the distance, as if evoking lost memories. The flower crown tells me of the continuation of a dream I will never wake from.

[realsimulacra-blog]

Donovia

Earlier this year I spent some time in Donovia.  Unless you're familiar with the US Army's Operational Environment and Opposing Force (OPFOR) program, or have read the Decisive Action Training Environment (DATE) manual, or can recite Army Regulation 350-2 provisions off-book, then you've never heard of it.

AR 350-2 dictates that unclassified training simulations must use fictitious countries to represent opposing forces.  As an act of compliance, the DATE manual is essentially an RPG campaign guide for the Army, wherein the geography, demographics, histories, and politics of five different made-up countries are laid out in 824 pages of meticulous detail.

My Donovia was located at the McKenna Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) training site at Fort Benning, Georgia - two hours from Atlanta.  The Donovian population complained about the brutal heat in remarkably good English, and with remarkably southern US accents.  They were role-players hired to sell wooden onions, plastic tomatoes, and rubber racks of lamb at the fake marketplace.  Two men playing belligerent drunkards clung to empty, unbranded vodka bottles as they stumbled through the concrete streets of the McKenna complex.  Later, they'd compete with a desperate woman holding a sick baby doll for the attention of an Army patrol squad.

The need for changing the country names for unclassified simulations seems obvious - let not the Iranians discover via Tumblr (...) that the US is specifically training for combat missions in Iran.  However, you might expect a few more liberties to be taken beyond simply changing "Iranian" to "Arianian".

Aside from the names of the countries, all other features of the stand-in countries are almost entirely unchanged.  City names, demographics, histories, and politics are identical to their real-life analogs. For example, the Army's brainstorming sessions for naming the capital of Donovia produced a city called "Moscow".

My Donovian experience oscillated between tedium and hyper-stimulation.  We got bored enough between scenarios to invent Donovian words and phrases.  We made our company's motion-capture-controlled avatars (as shown projected on the wall above) do the Whip/Nae Nae.  We used a rubber replica of a severed arm to showcase our maturity level as seasoned simulation professionals:

The DATE manual is available to the public for download.  Like most other official military documents I've encountered, it's chock-full of artifact-laden images from 7th-generation JPEGs, a garish color palette, and more acronyms than there are stars in the sky.  But if you have a twelve-sided die and a lot of time on your hands, you can use it to become the intrepid Dungeon War Master you were always meant to be.

[libutron]

Swimming file clam (Limaria sp.) by wildsingapore on Flickr.

A través de Flickr: More about this bivalve on the wildfacts sheets on wildsingapore. 300dpi photo free for download. Please credit to Ria Tan www.wildsingapore.com Photo reference: 120721tptd8003

[dailydiatom]

Welcome

...to the "Daily Diatom", the blog for my gallery at Anne S Schwaderer Photography.