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On a regional to San Fran from Silicon Valley, I happened to notice two Chinese students, visa holders in the USA studying at our schools to prepare for work back in the Motherland, who were talking in loud volumes (possible due to the engines of the Fokker 50 being so noisy) discussing the inferiority of the American way to the Chinese. In particular what surprised me was the arrogance they displayed; Chinese are long thought to be some of the most modest people on the planet. Perhaps because me and my friend Liz introduced ourselves in Mandarin and Cantonese, respectively, that they thought we were one of their own, or maybe because the novellist and the paper baroness sitting in the aisle to their left were dressed in suits and dresses (we were arriving in San Fransisco for a business meeting with an advertiser who had offered to pay for the free wood campaign that would be needed this year due to the impending hurricane), they thought we were wealthy people who could be trusted. In any case, one of them promptly started making fun of Detroiters; he claimed that in five years all of Detroit’s industries would be sold to China and Detroit as a city would be either closed down or its labor would be sold to other countries as a labor commodity; in effect, he saw no future for Detroit. What a moron. He obviously hadn’t realized that the two of us were from Detroit, and our two businesses, the printing business I grew from a hobby and the newspaper business Liz grew from hers, would keep Detroit running even into five years the future. It is only 2012. What do they expect? The end of the world is only half a year away. So long, suckers!

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story by Nathan Guannan Zhang. Sure, it’s longer than five sentences, but read it for the point. The businesses listed herein are mostly haven’t been started or not going to die soon, so don’t get excited. The story takes place on July 21st, 2012. Doomsday is on December 21st, 2012, according to some. I wrote this to make fun of a common assumption among non-Detroiter Chinese… remember, when you assume, you make an A-S-S out of U & ME!

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Beep. Jake looked up at his screen. There was a large blip on the radar screen, and no identification was given for it. Jake called his supervisor upstairs on the telecom, informing him of the radio anamoly. Two minutes later two other blips moved out at angles to the base of the screen and approached the unidentified flying object at high speed, and then there was nothing. The next day, the local media was abuzz with stories of a foreign businesswoman’s plane that was accidentally shot down by American jets in a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding is not what the businesswoman’s fellow countrymen thought, and within a year, the United States was no longer a sovereign nation, its people the subjects of a dictator whose bloodlust far exceeded his humanity.

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story by Nathan Guannan Zhang. please comment. remember what the disclaimer says when posting comments!

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The sirens came closer, and Todd looked out the window. He jolted when he saw the cruiser running at his girlfriend’s car at full speed. Two split-moments later, impact occured. Todd was thrown around and a large chunk of glass cut him up severely. The officer came out of the car and shouted at Todd’s girlfriend, who protested, screaming and begging him to call an ambulance. Mouthing an obscenity, the officer looked inside the car, pulled out his Glock, took aim, and pulled the trigger three times; when he came out of the cabin, he holstered his projectile weapon and told the girl to calm down, muttering, “The gook is dead”. Two weeks later the officer would get a promotion for this from the very corrupt system that exterminated a patriotic youth who wanted to die for his country with honor.

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Ok, yeah, I know that was more than five sentences, but it works. this story by Nathan Guannan Zhang. Please comment, digg, bookmark this on delicious, magnolia and facebook, and tell all your friends about it (just remember that the story and its characters are completely hypothetical. The behaviors exhibited by the characters are real)!

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Our teacher, Joffrey Parks, once asked us to discuss what we saw in the issue of China and the US’ relationship. Dan Wu, obviously the pro Chinese extremist of the crowd, said that China will never be able to have a safe democracy and that the US will one day bow to all Chinese, because Chinese were the supreme race. The rest of us Asians and Chinese Americans in the class were shocked by his arrogance, his immodesty, his militarism and his downright stupidity in terms of what he knew about Chinese foreign policy. Didn’t he know that China wanted outreach with the nations of the world? Moron. Only an idiot could stand in the way of the foreign policy of the Dragon…

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story by Nathan Guannan Zhang. Please comment. Characters and story are completely hypothetical.

There was once a magical republic on a planet in a system far away. In this magical republic there were two young men. Their names were Lucius Solarion and Rossum Imperious. These two young men studied hard a a major university in the capital city of the magical republic. The city was suspended in the air above the mountaintops on a hovering rock. Anyway, the two young men were avid students of literature and the sword arts. Both were masterful students of a famous swordmaster. Rossum was the student of Ichinon Kenandon, a forceful, brute-strength swordfighter, and Lucius was the student of Maye Thaiesoae, a graceful, subtle-movements swordmaster. Only one student would win the love of both, a girl by the name of Freya Wyndhaven.

From day one Lucius studied business. He learned of standard costs, opportunity costs, and traceable costs. He worked at building a writing and publishing business. He designed entire worlds for his characters to live in. He was in love with his work, but he never forgot to murder his darlings when the time came.

Rossum started out as a roboticist. He worked to build a robot army that could swarm around their enemies, striking this way and that, and destroy them in a matter of moments. He hated his creations dearly, and never forgoed their destruction when the time to dismantle his creations came.

As is the case with most members of an existence race coming-of-age in interesting times as the old Sinican curse goes, Rossum and Lucius came-of-age in a time known as the Indigo, or Blue, Revolution, a time when social customs and moral traditions were being changed for new social customs or uprooted for new mores. In those days the young would no longer talk of what life meant for themselves, rather, they would talk of what life meant for the existence.

There were many issues at stake in the lives of the young during the Indigo Revolution. One such issue was pollution. In our world, pollution refers to smog and soot filling up the air we breathe, making our conditions unhealthy to live in. On Lucius’ planet, pollution refers to the amount of waste that was being put out by their facilities in the atmosphere. Most civilizations existing on the surface and not in flying rocks would be organic hydroponic agronomic cultures, otherwise they would produce herbs used as medicines. The flying rock civilizations would usually be massive cities, filled with restless, bright, polite people who could never be counted on to protect the ones below from falling meteors but were always counted on to keep the agrarian economies surviving in times of need. The rockers had lots of domesticated animals, many of whom were artificially bred to be abundant and tasty. The landers had plenty of crops to be used as food, and the two civilizations would trade their goods along a production possibilities frontier, ever increasing the output everytime a new orgainc fertilizer was discovered or the waste material rained down from the rocks overhead and fertilized the plains and forested mountains below. On the other hand, when the crops could be grown more in less time, this meant that more animals could be fed and raised and more animals fed and raised led to more butchers needing to be hired, and when the day was over, there was more food for both rockers and landers.

Lucius was originally a lander, having come from a massive, ancient, agricultural civilization which at one point in its existence was far more technologically advanced than the rest of the planet’s inhabitant sovereignties. Its comestibles output was far more than the rockers typically output today. Lucius only lived for two years as a lander, then his parents, new immigrants to rocker society, brought him to the flying rock known as Freedom Summit and raised him as a citizen of the rock of the free. Freedom was not free; rather, it was protected by those who fought and gave their lives for freedom and liberty so that others too could live in Freedom Summit without worry of invasion or death from cataclysmic disaster.

On the other hand, Rossum  came from a rock society known for its arrogance and aggression. Known as Arthur’s Boulder, the rock he lived on tumbled through the skies and smashed smaller rocks into oblivion or fused together with rocks needing its protection, then becoming difficult to break free from. Over the past three hundred years since Freedom’s rebellion and discharge from Arthur’s Boulder, the Boulder had been losing parts and pieces until right after the Second Great War the Freedom Summit paid much in terms of support to make sure that its ancestor rock did not collapse under its own weight and spell demise for its civilians and the denizens of the lander societies below.

Rossum was raised on Arthur’s Boulder for one year before coming the Freedom Summit; he then returned for another five years when he was thirteen cycles old to attend to his father’s position as a company leader before returning to Freedom Summit.

Rossum was a brash and arrogant fellow, and some say he was quite mad. He had the tendency to tell others to be quiet or he would smash a chair into the skulls. He said things without thinking of the consequences. He often wore a beard or would shave it and keep his dark moustache. He had military-cropped haircut and slim glasses. He talked in a sadistic tone and had certain qualities that would make most rockers annoyed or feel threatened.

Lucius, on the other hand, was a smily and humble person, and always took time to consider his actions before he committed to them. He would watch himself, be nice, and make sure people liked him before he went ahead and made friends with strangers. He would start conversations just for the fun of it, and loved to talk and give his opinion. Sometimes his opining made his cousins bored, but they were always so enthused with his ideas that they never fell asleep even though he would chatter on and on and on about things which they had no intellect to comprehend.

To be continued…

The day after he was buried, Tom Vanderhoff’s company, GreenPub.com, started succession meetings for their new chief executive officer. After a bit of debate, it was decided that Jim Wilkins would be Vanderhoff’s successor. Wilkins was a man of many words, but few letters. He always had a smile on his face, and said just the things you wanted to hear. But ever since he came to GreenPub.com, the company had been losing a few dollars a day. GreenPub.com was still in the black, but it was losing small amounts of money everyday even while the financial reports clearly stated that the company was experiencing 300% a year growth. It was always the steady 5 dollars that was being lost each day. Over time, the losses became so regular that few bothered to check into it. It was thought that several others were responsible, and those innocent ones had been terminated for it. Wilkins was never caught, but he continued to steal. He also made himself appear to be a skilled manager, and always took up new opportunities to lead people in teams and get them to produce beyond the competition. Jim worked from his first job to his last in the same company, from age fourteen as a copy machine operator to the day he died as CEO. And it would only be the fact that he was a klepto that would lead to his death. Tom Vanderhoff was known as a company boss who was never messed with. From his early days as a zine maker to his work as a copy shop manager (of the company he started, GreenCopies LLC) to his days as an online “Digital Marxist” self-publishing house boss to his death as CEO of multimillion dollar green technology conglomerate CEO, he was a manager and a competitor who was loved as well as feared simultaneously. Tom Vanderhoff had a favorite saying. He always said that if someone did to him any wrongful acts, he would come back from the Other Side to track down and destroy his enemies.

One day, as CEO Jim Wilkins was walking into the elevator, he got a strange feeling in his right arm. He closed the door, and just as he was about to hit the button for the parking garage (he was headed home after a long day at work), he saw a strange and familiar face in the side panel. Turning to face the side panel, he noticed nothing, so he immediately turned back to face the control board. Suddenly, the lights darkened. He thought to himself, Come on now, we cannot just lose power when we’re all about to go home, can we? Strangely, another thought came in right then: Oh yes we can. Everyone else will go home, but you and I shall have a little chat, shall we, Jim? Mental laughter followed. Jim looked around. Boy, is it getting awfully hot in here! Just as he thought that, the room suddenly got extremely chilly, and his sweat got cold enough that the water was just above the freezing point. Jim shivered. Cold, is it?! Now you know what death feels like! Ha! You? A CEO?! I would never have thought of it! Looks like this is what we get for installing a democratic leadership system on top of a federal operating system! Grunts. You were always a thief. I just never had the sense to fire you when I could have…

Jim felt extremely frightened at his seemingly schizoid behavior in the elevator. He felt around in the cabin for a light switch. None to be found. He felt the walls, and had a feeling something warm and putrid scented was running down his pants. Immense amounts of it, in fact, because he touched the floor and it was wet and deep. He also felt a warm liquid run from his nose. Both nasal cavities were congested with some type of metallic liquid. He soon passed out.

The story is about $5.50 USD for online reading or $15 USD for hard copy reading. This story is copyleft GNU LGPL 2.0

Please do not plagiarize. One less literary terrorist is ten more literary geniuses. Take that however and wherever you want…

Right now I make less than 400 USD a month so I don’t think I am going to be able to get a sales tax license, even if I wanted one (I do, just to be safe). I doubt I’ll break even with my room and board by the end of the summer, though if I do, I have to get off SSI (I have PDDNOS, so that’s why).

Lastly, if there are any other bloggers out there who would like to read my stories, just remember, constructive critique will keep me at this blog. Oh, and I am restarting ShenshuaiOne some time this summer. I also plan to have a serious discussion with Kwame Kilpatrick and try to do one of either two things: (1) get him to apologize to the community (especially the business community, which has a bad image now because of his deeds), and seek appropriate reprimand from the community, or (2) petition the government to get him to step down should he try anything stupid (like take away certain citizens’ First Amendment Rights or property or dissolve oppositional businesses through Emminent Domain).

Have fun reading my story. God Speed and Blessings from Detroit, Nathan Guannan Zhang (AKA Doomsday Profit)

mew?

What do you mean, mew?

mew mew?

Aww, cute little kitty cat…

mew… purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…

Mew Mew to You Too!

mew… purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

In the next few weeks, I will populate this space with scifi stories, science and tech news articles, and podcasts…