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About 20 years ago I was trying to join a Transformers fan forum. It was a very large, very popular forum at the time, and had also been around for a while. Cue me discovering the hard way that most of the usernames I'd been using on other forums were already taken. In a fit of frustration, I picked a character from some fan fiction I'd been writing at the time. It worked. Some of the users there were also on a few other forums I was going to at the time, so I kept the same username across each forum. As far as the picture goes, it was one of several dozen pre-prepared images on one forum I went to a long, long time ago that we could use as our avatars. It was so long ago that I don't even remember the forum I got it from, and said forum likely doesn't exist anymore anyway.

My user name is reflective of my main hobby. Model trains. It is the brand name of the trains I run and collect.

Salt Lake and neighboring valleys are also home to at least 7 of the people on this board, you know, in case you wanted to attempt to meet any virtual person in real life. You could plan for 2027, when the Salt Lake Temple open house is scheduled... (At least, I think it's 2027. I highly recommend against trying to come during the Olympics - I fully expect the Lord to burn Salt Lake City to the ground during that event (presumably He'll preserve the temple, though)... )

Concatenation of my last name and profession. A nickname that stuck during my first year of residency internship. The image of Lurch is a nod to my personality.

I took my username from an old Marty Robbins western ballad of the same name. I felt a particular kinship, I guess, with the titular character, as I, too, would be "judged to be about 5 foot three, but without the soft Texas drawl."

For userid and passwords, I do a double-whammy of unlikely words. I use obscure words or proper nouns and purposefully misspell them. There is no dictionary in the world that would have any of my passwords. My userid is a misspelling of the stone known as carborundum. I came across it in a lab in college. We were trying to grind down some concrete to a specific dimension. And we were using a stone that resembled a volcanic rock (with all the nooks and crannies of the stones that looked like charred sponges). I asked the crew if anyone knew what this stone was made of that could withstand grinding away at concrete without seeming to wear itself at all. I can't be sure what a classmate said. He may have said it with the "u" sound, but what I heard was "carborendum." That was what stuck with me. (It is used as a grindstone because it has a hardness of 9 to 9.5 on the Mohs scale.) As the blogosphere got bigger and social media was a thing, I figured I needed a unique userid. None of the "add some number" to make it unique. I wanted it to be unique. So, I chose "Carborundum." But, of course, to make it truly unique, I purposefully misspelled it. And I like the sound better anyway. As I described the rock form as being like the porous stone, the crystal form is a sight to behold. So, I did a web search for images of carborundum and found my current avatar.

I meant that search engines and the media not telling us about things / making it hard to find things has been the norm. And just because NT found it doesn't mean you necessarily would - google's search algorithms for him will be different from the ones they use for you... Anywho, my point was, you should not be surprised when you find out that information is hard to find...

I'm aware there have always been "protests." What I'd been hearing is that they have gotten to the point where Xi is afraid. The numbers reported were higher than Tiananmen Square. And it is not just one day. It continues to get worse. Apparently it has been so for the past few weeks. But I just couldn't get details on it from sources that were not "fringe." Yes, take a look at the dates on those. They were in just the past few days. Only one is about a week old. And, yes, I'm seeing them now, which was why I finally posted about it. I didn't want to be the boy who cried wolf because it was just a fringe site posting clickbait. I've been hearing about it on foreign and fringe sites for weeks. It was basically from the moment Xi raised tariffs on the US. That was a few weeks ago IIRC. But since I first heard about it, I couldn't find anything on legacy media or even "mainstream conservative" sites -- incl NYPost. Only in the past couple of days did I start thinking it was real. And they're acting (writing) as if they'd all been talking about it for weeks. No, they haven't.

Dude awesome thread.

Mirkwood is the forest of giant spiders and elves in The Hobbit. It is one of my favorite parts of the story. It was the name I selected on my first forum (the now defunct Rush Message Board) and what I have used pretty much everywhere ever since. I wear these two patches on my body armor under my uniform. I like boonie hats, sometimes I have a beard and I have a suppressed AR15. It kind of matches who I am.

For the profile picture / avatar, you must begin with this comment ("Guest" in this interaction is @Carborendum's previous incarnation): ...and continue reading until the "sheathen" bit runs dry. (It seems to have taken a moment for folks to recognize that sheathen is just a female heathen.) It stuck around as a running joke across threads, and so I drew my avatar to match. (Yes, zil was me, but I clobbered that account back when I was having hard times, to prevent myself from using it, and apparently I did such a good job that it couldn't be recovered, so when I was ready to come back, I needed a new account, hence, zil2.) As for how I chose my user name... I inverted my name (the first time; the second time, I did as described above - added a 2). Sadly, the site's indexing appears to be broken, and badly enough that even google can barely find any instances of "sheathen". It's possible it took a couple weeks for the avatar change - which I might have made for this post (I drew the avatar): And because the site indexing is broken, I can't go back and relive all the fun referenced in this post: But I can see that we used to have more fun, per my previous opinion, and therefore we ought to have more fun again. I think we need to coax @Jamie123 to finish the adventures of Henry the vacuum cleaner: Which ended in a cliffhanger - ironically, at the bottom of a cliff (be sure to check out the second installment on page 2 of the thread).

Dr. Miklebergenstein, bone bender?

Well, it's easy to see why it's not getting much US coverage. Consider: Trump's trade war with China is intended to make China blink once millions of Chinese start losing their jobs and the Chinese economy starts suffering. Now there are protests, maybe even some rioting. The left media: We can't really talk about unrest in China, it would mean admitting Trump's having an impact in China, and they're feeling the pressure. Our voters align with street protesters, and they might start wanting China to cave. The right media: We can't really talk about unrest in China, it would mean admitting China might be more willing to suppress it's own population and maybe even kill a bunch of its own citizens, than lose face to Trump. It would look like Trump has blood on his hands.