The Republic of Awesome

Hey guys! I am back to blogging, after a 3 month hiatus!

If you’re curious why I stopped, it’s simply because I had lost sight of what the Republic of Awesome is for.

Add to that I started to have a pretty low impression of this whole blogging thing. Too goddamn attention-seeking and narcissistic for my taste.

“OOOH LOOK AT ME I’M SO FUCKEN PRETTY!”

Oh and did I mention I’m quite turned off by the desperate attempts people make at getting traffic? Please guys, don’t post in my chatbox useless crap like “blogwalk lolz”. Walk somewhere else. Like into an oncoming bus.

If you want visitors, at least attempt to add some goddamn value. Contribute your thoughts on what the writer has said; or written language too complex for you?

Anyway, enough of that.

I realise now that the Republic of Awesome exists to make the world better in its own small way. If you’ve ever chuckled like an idiot while reading my articles, then by George, mission fuckin’ accomplished!

“BY GEORGE!”

So stock up on emergency supplies, lock away your teenaged daughters, take your vitamins, and buy extra toilet paper: for I am back and you better damned well be prepared!

This will be a running series (hopefully) on various examples of badassery you will do well to learn from and apply in your life. Get your notepads ready, gentlemen.

Oberst (Colonel) Hans-Ulrich Rudel was a German ace pilot in World War 2. Specifically, he was a dive-bomber pilot, flying over 2,500 combat missions and destroying 2,000 targets. Among them include 519 tanks and and a motherfucking Soviet battleship.

He also downed 9 enemy aircraft which is fairly remarkable considering the dive bomber aircraft he flew in weren’t too big on the air-to-air combat bit. If anything, the slow and poorly manoeuvrable planes were like wounded gazelles on the African savannah to enemy fighter aircraft.

Pictured: How to look appropriately Nazi badass

On the 29th of December 1944, Rudel was awarded with the Ritterkreuz mit Goldenem Eichenlaub, Schwertern und Brillanten (Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds in Gold), the highest German military award one could hope to receive.

In case you can’t get your head out of your ass, it’s like unlocking all achievements and obtaining top accolades in Modern Warfare 2. Only 3,000,000,000 times more awesome.

Seriously, dude.

You’d think heroes like this are forged from the testicles of God himself, that they are born into the world ready to jump into a death machine and bring complete obliteration to their enemies. Surely this level of l33t pwnage is not conferred upon mere mortals?

As it turns out, Rudel actually started off as a complete n00b pilot.

How n00b, you ask?

He was actually turned away from dive-bomber training school because he had difficulty learning their techniques.

This is like Tiger friggin’ Woods being turned down from the International School of Philandering, Golfing, and Adultery because he couldn’t get jackshit into the appropriate holes.

“Fuck you, International School of PGA!”

Instead, Rudel was relegated to the not-so-glamourous task of long-range air reconnaissance.

Discontent to just sit back and take photos of shit without destroying things, Rudel reapplied to be a dive-bomber. Multiple times.

Finally, through his persistence (write this down in your notepad, gentlemen), Rudel was reassigned to a dive-bomber squadron. Nonetheless, because of his reputation as a n00b, he was initially relegated to non-combat roles.

He finally got a taste of the action when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. All that pent-up desire for wanton destruction finally had an outlet, and 3 months into his combat career, Rudel blew the aforementioned motherfucking Soviet battleship to bite-sized pieces.

Thus began his career in pure badassery, both within and outside a Stuka.

During one occasion, Rudel landed his aircraft behind enemy lines to aid the crew of a downed Stuka. Unable to take off due to muddy conditions, the four of them hoofed it across the cold terrain, chased by Soviet soldiers.

Good thing they weren’t on Bear Cavalry!

They had to make their way down a steep cliff by sliding down trees, then swim 600m across the icy Dniester river. Rudel’s gunner succumbed to the cold river and drowned.

You’d think that’d be the end of it, what with having completed a triathlon in frigid temperatures. Nope - a few miles from the river they were captured by the Soviets.

Rudel, probably muttering something like “fuck this shit” in German, made a run for it. Despite being covered in wet clothes, barefooted, shot through the shoulder, and chased by half the Soviet army (with packs of dogs and probably bear cavalry), he somehow made it back to the German lines.

“Damnit!!”

In fact, Rudel was so hated by the Soviets that Stalin himself placed a 100,000 ruble bounty on his head.

100,000 Rubles: Not really worth that much.

The badassery doesn’t stop there though.

At one point, Rudel’s plane was hit by a 40mm anti aircraft shell. The plane was badly damaged and Rudel’s right foot had been severely injured. Crash landing the plane, Rudel was saved by his gunner, who stopped the bleeding. Unfortunately, his right leg also had to be amputated below the knee.

Rudel shrugged and said, “ah it was a good run. I’m firmly happy to retire now.”

NOT.

He got right back into a plane and turned another 26 tanks into smoking piles of junk before the war ended.

Which of you pussies can seriously say that you’d get back to killing things after you get a leg lopped off?

That is pure badassery.

Quentin Tarantino knows how badassery works.

Ok so in case you didn’t already guess it, the previous post is a sham.

A well researched sham but a sham nonetheless. References:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Industry_of_North_Korea
• http://www.fas.org/asmp/campaigns/smallarms/IssueBrief3ArmsTrafficking.html
• http://www.havocscope.com/ak-47-price-in-the-niger-delta/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Bout
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_trafficking

If you’re doing a report on arms smuggling, I basically did all the work for you. Freeloader.

Some stats for the day*:

Attempted: 14

Number of people conned: 4.5

Number of times Arms Smuggler story used: 9

Number of times Arms Smuggler story succeeded: 0.5

Number of times other stories succeeded: 4

Number of times conned: 0

*Note that stats are for Face-to-Face only. Online stats are unknown.

Moral of the story: It is thusly proven that I do not have a mouth that can talk shit into gold. QED, motherfuckers!

Everyone has dark secrets. Mine are perhaps darker than most.

I’ve kept a huge one for far too long now. Two fuckin’ years to be exact.

Fuck it. I can’t take it anymore. Can you imagine having the most incredible story of your life and not being able to tell anyone? The inner tension is so bad I’m sure it could kill you.

I’m telling it here. A part of it anyway. I’m still afraid there would be consequences.

If you know me personally, perhaps I’ve told you part of this, in a joking manner.

I wasn’t joking. I was cracking up. I just couldn’t keep it in anymore. If you knew the truth, you’d have thought me the scum of the universe.

But it’s too late. Better you read it here than somewhere else. At least you’ll hear my side of the story first.

How do I start?

In the middle I guess. I don’t want to elaborate on how it began. That would compromise too many good friends now unrelated with what I did.

So here it is in a nutshell:

Those stories I ‘made up’ about selling guns to Zambia, then the D.R. of Congo?

They were true.

Well, I didn’t sell them directly. I mostly handled the back-end duties. Some basic creative accounting, email correspondence and coordination with our field agents, and cycling the illegal profits back into the legal money system.

Nonetheless I was involved and a willing accomplice.

You’d be surprised how easy it is to launder money in Singapore. Banks here, unlike the USA, do not have regulation on how much you can deposit before they start checking your books. Even if they checked, you could have the money out of the country long before they can do anything.

But enough with the boring accounting shit. Here’s the interesting part – how we actually acquired our stocks of arms.

Suppliers were mostly from North Korea. It is corrupted as fuck there! The ranking officers were selling their surplus North Korean Type 68’s at US$100 a piece. We issued them receipts for US$70 (which were given to the government) and they pocketed the difference.

The rifles were bundled into trucks and driven across the Chinese border. A small bribe allows smooth passage of the merchandise. At a small town called Dalijiazhen 300km from the border, the cargo would be unloaded at an aquatic farm along the shoreline. The goods are then loaded on a boat.

After a quick run through the bay, the boat reaches Changhai Island, which has an operational international airport. Disguised as plumbing parts, the crates of weapons are loaded onto a cargo plane. This cargo plane heads straight for Zambia where our goods are either sold to the local government, or shipped across the border to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where ongoing localized conflicts ensure a steady demand.

The North Korean Type-68. Fairly decent Russian AKM copy.

We shipped about 10,000 pieces twice a year. They were sold at roughly $300. I say roughly because we were usually paid in diamonds. Minus the cost of dissolving these conflict diamonds into the market, we generally had around $3,000,000 revenue per shipment.

That was our main operation. On the side, we shipped Chinese handguns to criminal organizations around South East Asia. In fact, I kept a Norinco Model 77B from one of our shipments. It sits on my table as I write this.

We didn’t supply the 7.62mm rounds though.

Life was good. I didn’t get a very large cut, but it was plenty to live well.

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end.

Our top masterminds were recently arrested, crippling our organization. Investigators are penetrating our whole network. It’s just a matter of time before I get implicated as well.

I’m not sure what to do, but writing this out made me feel… better? I don’t know – it’s probably not going to help seeing as everything is FUBAR anyway.

Edit: I just got a call from my Singaporean partner. There were police outside his building. I’m going to dispose of the Norinco. Blogs are not considered as evidence in court, right?

One very very annoying thing about NUS is that they give you a webmail account the size of hamster testicles. That would be fine, except that they then spam said account like as if they were Nigerian scammers dying of starvation.

George Agdgdgwngo shows us how it’s done.

More often than not, you’d run out of space on your account, and then they’d proceed to shut it down. Which means you cannot receive more of their spam… and other very important emails.

FML!!!

The solution is to auto-forward all mails to a Gmail or Hotmail account which have Gigabytes of storage space.

Therefore, when my friend You Jun wrote a short guide on how to auto-forward mails from his NTU account, I decided to appropriate the guide for use on the NUS webmail system (which is exactly the same as the NTU one…)

Step 1 – Setting up a Forwarding Rule

First, log in to your NUS webmail account. Use Internet Explorer as it has the Microsoft Outlook thing built in. Chrome and Firefox doesn’t.

Find the Rules button. It should be in the left sidebar, below Public Folders. Click on that, then click on the New rule button. It should be on top.

Simple, yes? Now a dialogue box will pop up, in which case you fill in your Gmail/Hotmail or whatever address you wish to forward your emails to.

You can ignore all other fields except for the ‘Foward it to’ field.

Oh and remember to uncheck the ‘Keep a copy in my Inbox’ button. Or you’d keep a space-eating copy in your NUS webmail which will defeat the purpose of this whole exercise.

Click the Save and Close button and you’re done!

From now on, all mails arriving to your NUS inbox will simply be forwarded to your Gmail/Hotmail, leaving your NUS email clean and empty.

Step 2 - (Optional) Getting Gmail to send as NUS Webmail

This step allows you to send mail from Gmail as u0xxxxxx@nus.edu.sg, which is awesome as you’ll never have to login to NUS webmail ever again!

I’m only writing on how to get Gmail to do it (because I <3 Google and it has 7GB of space). If you’re a Hotmail user you can read instructions for Hotmail here.

How to do it with Gmail:

(Click to enbiggenize picture)

1. Click on Settings, it’s on the top right hand corner.
2. Click on the Accounts and Import tab.
3. Click on the Send mail from another address button.
4. Input your name and your NUS webmail address
5. Click Next Step.

The next step is to configure your SMTP server thingamajig, which I think is too troublesome. Just go with the default Gmail settings and click Next Step again.

Gmail will then send a verification email to your NUS webmail. Go to NUS webmail, open the mail from Gmail, click on the verification link and you’re done!

Yes you are now free from the clutches of the evil NUS webmail system! Go celebrate with a bottle of old wine and muse on how your life is kinda sad since this is your greatest achievement this week.