tasuki’s blog

Chile is a country in South America and England is in Europe, but the problem is that except of it being very far there is an ocean between (in case you don’t know), so it’s probably quite a problem to get from Chile to England on foot.

Yet Karl Bushby decided to try it. He started in 1998 and now he’s somewhere in Russia, having crossed the dangerous Bering Strait. Karl plans on finishing his more than 50 000 km journey in 2009. It’s almost unbelievable that someone is willing to spend more than 10 years of his life just walking around the world…

You can find much more info (photos, journal, etc.) on official pages of the Goliath expedition.

While reading fullcontactpoker forums I stumbled upon a post named “What’s so bad with killing children?“. I suggest you to read at least the first page of the thread (later it turned into a series of useless personal attacks). Here is the relevant excerpt from the Bible:

2 Kings, 2:23-24.

23: And he (Elisha) went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.
24: And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

Pretty hardcore, huh? I’d rather suggest following ninth Satanic rule – “do not harm little children”.

I thought that Bible probably contains more inconsistencies and just plainly weird things, so I made a bit of a searching and found Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. It rocks. It contains full Bible thoroughly commented, you can also search by cathegories (such as contradictions (wouldn’t believe there are so many of them), absurdities, cruelty and violence).

Here an example of absurdity, God was angry because “the earth was filled with violence.” So he killed every living thing to make the world less violent:

Genesis 6:11-13

11: The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.

12: And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.

13: And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

But it isn’t really difficult to find many utterly ridiculous things there – actually it is difficult to find a page in Bible without contradictions with other parts. I seriously pity all the people who have chosen the Bible as something to lead them through their lives.

PS: Let the flaming begin, I am prepared to dodge bullets.

I am seriously pissed off. I just read over at pokerstars blog about their 5 billionth hand. They have thrown $100,000 (one hundred thousand dollars) away. Yup, they gave it to the 5 billionth raked hand participants.

Sure, poker sites get a lot of money from rake, and this is a way to say thanks or rather to give back a small amount of what they raked. But this is just lottery, taking small amount of money from a lot of people to give a lot of money to just very few persons. If they lowered the fscking rake, players (at least the sane ones (and I believe there are many of them)) would be much happier.

What I meant is   poker players are there to play poker, if they wanted to play a stupid lottery they would just go and buy a stupid lottery ticket, it’s that simple. Well, I am probably unable to express myself clearly, since I am pretty angry, but if you think about it you won’t need my explaining.

PS: Blog is a veeery good thing when you need to complain and you just can’t find anyone that would be willing to listen.

They are utterly lame. I can’t imagine anything lamer than nicks that just end with numbers because the original nick wasn’t available (the exception for this are of course l33t n1ck5, that’s acceptable).

I made a small test on KGS, based on knowledge that naruto fans are often dumber than average idiots. Well, of course, there is someone with nick “naruto”, that’s cool, the guy was first, so he got it. But you can also find “Naruto1″, “naruto2″, “naruto3″ and “Naruto6″ (who has email in his profile “kupoman3″, this guy is totally hopeless). Then I sorted the list of online users by name, and guess what — I saw “naruto337″ and “Naruto93″. Could it even get any worse?

Any sane person will try to come up with an original username, not distinguished by number at the end (I use “tasuki” when available, “sempai” when “tasuki” is already occupied, or “tasukisempai” when in despair (oh yeah, I think I also used “tasuki3″ once, but I understood pretty quickly that it’s lame)).

Concerning my nickname “tasuki”, I made a mistake too. It was back in 2001 or so (well, in this crappy country I didn’t even have internet access before) and I thought it was a term describing an opening in go. Had I investigated it all before, I would have found that it also means “kimono sash” and that it’s also a character from some crappy anime (or manga, I don’t know). I should have chosen the other one I was considering — “tenuki”, but at that time it seemed to me that it was too common word (it’s the other way actually) and although I liked it better, I settled on “tasuki” just to be more unique. At least it’s not as desperate as “naruto337″ and the likes.

If I had the option to choose my online nick again, I would definitely try to come up with something totally unique. While that might be an excuse for numbers (”hey, naruto337 is free anywhere”), the lameness remains pretty high.

Rob Gonsalves is an exceptional Canadian painter. Wikipedia states that his works can be classified as “magic realism” (someone really should upgrade that awful stud).

I’ve recently stumbled upon a collection of Rob Gonsalves’ pictures (reading digg is sometimes worth it). It’s a thread in a Russian forum, but I think that it doesn’t really matter as you don’t need to speak Russain to enjoy the pictures.

Concerning the pictures, they are really great and full of interesting things. The one you can see here on the left side includes people with kites, who (clockwise) change to puppets led by those… ummm… not sure what it is, let’s call it supernatural being

Now see the Russian forum until you get halfway through to the boy with little train in a dark room. I had very similar nightmares when I was a kid (like 7 or so I think). It wasn’t a train though, I was just playing with a small marble when a fucking huge globe appeared from nowhere and started very slowly coming in my direction. But since it was so fucking big, there was no point in trying to run, I’d get crushed anyway. Usually woke up with all my pyjamas totally sweaty. The nasty thing was that I had the dream several times, and the comparison between the tiny marble and the huge sphere… brrr, makes me shiver even now…

I like the good old dynamic serif typefaces (from 15th-17th century). The most well known is Garamond, which is also my favourite one, together with Pastonchi (which is so unknown it doesn’t even have its wikipedia page, although it’s a very sexy typeface (I especially love opennes of the small letter ‘f’ (see the pic on the right side), and letter ‘k’ is rather cute), so the link points to google). Then there’s Bembo, which isn’t quite as great as Garamond (let alone Pastonchi), but it’s still a fair one.

Someone thought it would be a funny idea to make animals of the Bembo letters, and so they did. It’s a stragne idea, but I quite like it. The only problem is that it’s waaay too fast. Show me the word and then let me watch it for at least five seconds (no, half a second is not enough, really).

Humm, yet another confused post. The headline says Bembo, then I get all excited about Pastonchi (and even include a picture (which has nothing to do with the headline, btw)) and then finish with Bembo again. Well, whatever, I’m not gonna rewrite it anyway…

I had to solve another issue at KGS today. Someone was swearing in hebrew (using word benzona) and one user pointed me to Urban dictionary. Well, I searched around a bit (of course) and the one I liked the most is the word fuck. The best description is probably the second one – from Monty Python (anyone knows where from exactly?), so go and vote for it so that it gets to the first place (community driven websites just rock (please remember this, in a few posts I will remind you))

I think I will just have to start smoking camel cigarettes. If any ad could persuade me to start smoking, it would be this one.

But seriously, I have no idea what target audience the creators had in mind when creating this ad (maybe, they were undercover go players trying to propagete go and even got paid for it).

If it seems a bit outdated to you… well, it is 30 years old.

You can click on the picture to view a bigger version.

Sometimes I write a post (or just intend to write it, like now) about a website that is completely in czech language. It makes no sense to write that in english, since any potential visitor has to know czech rather well to enjoy the site. On the other hand it wouldn’t make sense writing half blog posts in czech and half in english, or would it?

There are some words that are often misused. It drives me insane when I see native English speakers use “your” instead of “you’re” (I have no problems with “youre”, I can decipher that quite easily) and vice versa. Some people also use “their” instead of “they’re” or—even worse—instead of “there”. I can see no fucking connection between “there” and “their”, the words obviously have different root.

As my English education consists mainly of reading/writing, I absorbed at least these simple cases, and totally fail to understand how any native Englishman/American/Aussie with any basic education can make these mistakes (over and over again).

When trying to find out why people so often write “loose” when they mean “lose” (don’t ever do that or I’ll have to kill you) I found several interesting sites. One said that you can pronounce the word out loud to find out how to write it, that when you pronounce it “lu:s” then you write it as “loose” and when you pronounce it “lu:z” then you write it as “lose”. Actually I got just the reversed information from this one – that loose is not pronounced the same as lose.

Then I found a very useful site about commonly confused words. The site explains the differencies very clearly and offers short tests to confirm that you understand it.

The words in which people make mistakes but I don’t care:
advice/advise, desert/dessert, clothes/cloths, later/latter, it’s/its (its basically the same, some people just dont like to write apostrophes), and probably many many more… but I don’t care…
The words in which people make mistakes and it annoys me:
accept/except, affect/effect, among/between, farther/further, hear/here, hole/whole, knew/new/knoew/no, loose/lose, peace/piece (and what about peas? I guess they forgot), than/then, their/the’re/there, threw/through, to/too/two, wear/where/were, your/you’re

The words in which I make mistakes and it annoys me:
can/may (depends whether I’m concentrated), fewer/less (I use less exclusively), lay/lie (I finally learned the difference today after all these years)

All the rest are the ones I consider unimportant so I just don’t bother.