User:StoneGhost

About Me
Hey there, welcome to my shiny revamped userpage. I'm Athena32, but my real name's Matt. I'm a guy (contrary to the username), an active user and an busy person in general. I'm quite a social person but any time I'm not busy or out I'm normally on HF making my awesome Swarm War-related articles even more awesome. I enjoy sport and formerly played football for the school team, rugby for my local club and the district team, and I also enjoy short distance running. I am an A/B student at my local college, and while I don't really fit into any social group, I have a lot of good friends that I trust and enjoy myself with. On Halo Fanon, I like writing articles, mainly of a factual nature though I am trying to write a few stories (with little success). I love music; it makes up a big part of my life. My favourite genres would be indie and rock, though generally most music is good. My favourite bands include The Killers, Coldplay, Interpol and Radiohead, though I could easily list a few thousand more. I don't really have a political position but I'm quite utilitarian; I strongly believe in doing the right thing, for the greater good. I am an on-off gamer and experience periods of near non-stop gaming, followed by months of the xbox gathering dust. My family has an unavoidable military connection (unfortunately for me), with most of the men in my family having served at some point, and seven relatives including my uncle serving currently. One of a number of users to join in mid 2009, I'm probably one of the lesser known active users here. As a result I often self-nominate for things like FOTM and Good Articles; please don't mistake my attempts at self-publicity for attention whoring. I'm often on the IRC if you wanna talk, though if not just buzz me at my talk page. Cya.

Irk Nicks

 * Athena32
 * [A32]
 * Splinter
 * The_Warden
 * The_Wanderer
 * TheKeeper
 * Verdant_Helix
 * SKY_CRAWLER

Namespace

 * The IdeaBox
 * The Firing Range
 * The LaughBox
 * Cold Storage
 * Drydock
 * Join Log
 * Unfinished Articles

My Fanon
Since I joined this site in April 2009, virtually all of my fanon has focused on events surrounding the Swarm War. I've had the idea for several years before this and started writing some fiction on it, and I've adapted it to fit better into the Halo universe. While this has allowed me a huge degree of freedom in my writing, it lacks that distinctive 'Halo' feel to it. As the Swarm Project becomes ever more complete I feel compelled to diversify the range of my fanon, focusing more on the Human-Covenant War and the time before and after it. I will also explore the Reformation War (2416-2422) and the Galactic Civil War (2912-2951), events far in the past and future of my fanon respectively. Recently I have begun participating in the AAO Universe, revolving mainly for now around Manticore Team. A complete list of my fanon can be found here.

Poetry
"I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

The snow disfigured the public statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness

The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,

The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;

By mourning tongues

The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,

An afternoon of nurses and rumours;

The provinces of his body revolted,

The squares of his mind were empty,

Silence invaded the suburbs,

The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,

To find his happiness in another kind of wood

And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.

The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,

And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,

A few thousand will think of this day

As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and the innocent,

And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit,

Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views,

And will pardon Paul Claudel,

Pardons him for writing well.

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right

To the bottom of the night,

With your unconstraining voice

Still persuade us to rejoice.

With the farming of a verse

Make a vineyard of the curse,

Sing of human unsuccess

In a rapture of distress.

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountains start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise."

- In Memory of W.B Yeats, W.H Auden (1907-1973)

"The singer is old and has forgotten

Her girlhood's grief for the young soldier

Who sailed away across the ocean,

Love's brief joy and lonely sorrow:

The song is older than the singer.

The song is older than the singer

Shaped by the love and long waiting

Of women dead and long forgotten

Who sang before remembered time

To teach the unbroken heart its sorrow.

The girl who waits for her young soldier

Learns from the cadence of a song

How deep her love, how long the waiting.

Sorrow is older than the heart,

Already old when love is young:

The song is older than the sorrow."

- Maire Macrae's Song, Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) "In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin

that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud ...

but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood

run upwards from the slime into its wounds;

see lines and lines of British boys rewind

back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home -

mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers

not entering the story now

to die and die and die.

Dulce - No - Decorum - No - Pro patria mori.

You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)

like all your mates do too -

Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert -

and light a cigarette.

There's coffee in the square,

warm French bread

and all those thousands dead

are shaking dried mud from their hair

and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,

a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released

from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,

your several million lives still possible

and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.

You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.

If poetry could truly tell it backwards,

then it would."

- Last Post, Carol Ann Duffy (1955-) "Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at the end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

- Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) "Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

- The Second Coming, W.B Yeats (1865-1939) "Shall we, too, rise forgetful from our sleep,

And shall my soul that lies within your hand

Remember nothing, as the blowing sand

Forgets the palm where long blue shadows creep

When winds along the darkened desert sweep?

Or would it still remember, tho' it spanned

A thousand heavens, while the planets fanned

The vacant ether with their voices deep?

Soul of my soul, no word shall be forgot,

Nor yet alone, beloved, shall we see

The desolation of extinguished suns,

Nor fear the void wherethro' our planet runs,

For still together shall we go and not

Fare forth alone to front eternity."

- Love and Death, Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

"The singer is old and has forgotten

Her girlhood's grief for the young soldier

Who sailed away across the ocean,

Love's brief joy and lonely sorrow:

The song is older than the singer.

The song is older than the singer

Shaped by the love and long waiting

Of women dead and long forgotten

Who sang before remembered time

To teach the unbroken heart its sorrow.

The girl who waits for her young soldier

Learns from the cadence of a song

How deep her love, how long the waiting.

Sorrow is older than the heart,

Already old when love is young:

The song is older than the sorrow."

- Maire Macrae's Song, Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) "In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin

that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud ...

but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood

run upwards from the slime into its wounds;

see lines and lines of British boys rewind

back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home -

mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers

not entering the story now

to die and die and die.

Dulce - No - Decorum - No - Pro patria mori.

You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)

like all your mates do too -

Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert -

and light a cigarette.

There's coffee in the square,

warm French bread

and all those thousands dead

are shaking dried mud from their hair

and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,

a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released

from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,

your several million lives still possible

and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.

You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.

If poetry could truly tell it backwards,

then it would."

- Last Post, Carol Ann Duffy (1955-) "Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at the end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

- Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) "Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

- The Second Coming, W.B Yeats (1865-1939) "Shall we, too, rise forgetful from our sleep,

And shall my soul that lies within your hand

Remember nothing, as the blowing sand

Forgets the palm where long blue shadows creep

When winds along the darkened desert sweep?

Or would it still remember, tho' it spanned

A thousand heavens, while the planets fanned

The vacant ether with their voices deep?

Soul of my soul, no word shall be forgot,

Nor yet alone, beloved, shall we see

The desolation of extinguished suns,

Nor fear the void wherethro' our planet runs,

For still together shall we go and not

Fare forth alone to front eternity."

- Love and Death, Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)