I always thought Marilyn Manson was just an idiot. Shouting obscenities, trying to offend everyone in any possible way, etc. Then I saw few videos on youtube:
Marilyn Manson Bowling for Columbine
Marilyn Manson on O’Reilly
Marilyn Manson speech
While I am not going to start listening to his music (I just don’t like it), I started greatly respecting the guy. He is very smart and extremely articulate.
During the past few months, I saw several films, most of which are highly praised and widely considered as the best ones.
Here it goes, sorted by year of production, including my subjective score on a 1-10 scale (where 10 is best; I tried to be tough in scoring):
The Battleship Potemkin, 1925, 5/10: This one is really really old. And oh, it is full of propaganda. But I guess that considering how old it is (they made movies back then?) it’s not so bad.
Casablanca, 1942, 10/10: It’s a romance film, but very well set up. While I usually don’t even notice the (male) actors, Humphrey Bogart really made an impression on me.
The Searchers, 1956, 7/10: A western. Quite good, but I can’t say anything particularly remarkable.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966, 9/10: A western too. The three main characters are just unforgetable, they make it a pretty good story. And the music is just perfect, if it was only the music with black screen, it would have got 8/10. ;-)
The Godfather, 1972, 9/10: I liked this film a lot, although I can’t really point out a single reason why.
Pulp Fiction, 1994, 4/10: I give four out of ten just because I don’t want to infuriate fans of Quentin Tarantino.
Fight Club, 1999, 8/10: I really liked the ideas displayed in this film. innocent look ^^
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000, 2/10: Huge disappointment. This one got the two points solely for reminding me of a great sketch by Monty Python… I’m not on a wire!
I am planning to watch Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai and Schindler’s List. Any other recommendations?
The full title reads: The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology.
The Moral Animal is a book about evolutionary psychology written by Robert Wright.
I liked the book a lot, but I am a bit unsure what to write in here… The Moral Animal shows how our behaviour is primarily affected by evolution, how cold-hearted bastards we all are (yes, not just me – even you), and how even our deepest feelings are just a tool of evolution to make sure our genes succeed.
Desperately trying to write one more paragraph shows to be rather futile. So I will write no more. Now go and read the book! :)
You might have seen my crazy ticket folding gallery.
Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. :P
Here are some of the latest, greatest and bestest tickets:
This ticket is currently my favourite, but you’d have to see it as a whole to really appreciate it, seeing from just one direction simply isn’t enough. :)
Another view of the previous one, a bit of a rear view.
The part that you can see in the upper left gave me a lot of headache, and the more I try to do something reasonable with it, the worse it gets (the one thing that you should avoid when folding is making folds which tend to erase each other (ie. as you fold one the other unfolds and vice versa, that is exactly the situation in upper left))
This one has a lot of straight lines, but I still love it, the upper left contains one fold that shouldn’t have been there, but it can’t be really seen from this side :))
A very artificial one, cascading round folds (extremely difficult to do well, I succeeded here, although the pic might be a bit too small to see it properly.
Totally baroque ticket. It’s getting a bit old and I am afraid it will soon fall apart. Again, it has many features that need to be seen (and touched!) irl.
An artificial experiment that turned out very well. There is an annoying straight fold between the cascades which shouldn’t have been there.
The same, a bit less artistical lightning which allows a better view of the actual ticket.
Pure round fold. If you think that those tickets are easy to fold, try this. I made this one exclusively for the photo (I fold most of tickets just for the sake of folding, therefore they are rarely suitable for photos).
This is on the other end of the scale – 100% natural. I found it in the trash one day, crumpled and abandoned. Of course I saved it, removed some folds that needed removing and improved the good ones (and added a few of my own). I very much like it. It’s not very suitable for a photo though.
Round folds, one inside another. Quite photographable.
Wrapped up in itself – prolly needs to be seen irl to appreciate.
This is a rather big ticket (some 10x12cm) from Poland. Recently I added the leftmost fold (the one which can barely be seen), not a good idea, it disrupts the lower fold (as you can see).
Testing the boundaries.
Tight round fold, a bit tricky to keep it round, these tend to sharpen.
Just some cascades.
Am I crazy? Well yes, sure.
PS: Hello WordPress, could you fucking stop touching my html? Many thanks. >:-|
UPDATE: The photos are now clickable (use the middle mouse button in firefox to open in new tab).
I finished watching Neon Genesis Evangelion just yesterday.
I consider mecha genre childish, dull and stupid. No sane person can find a giant humanoid-looking robot suitable for fighting a war.
The way in which computers are “hacked” in Evangelion, is also rather weird. The defenders can see the progress the attacker is making in real time and in great detail (graphical representation). On the other hand, stopping the attacker is very difficult even when you know what exactly he is doing. This is like completely the opposite of how the real world works.
All in all, Evangelion is not a single bit realistic.
On the other hand – so much for the negatives.
The main characters are introduced gradually, so you are not overwhelmed. They all have dozens of psychological issues, which show in different ways (the director suffered from clinical depression, which makes it quite authentic). The story gradually shifts from action (I don’t really enjoy that much) to psychological, but still I think it’s a good idea to watch from the beginning, because otherwise you’ll be completely lost (well, in fact, you will be lost anyway…).
There are two alternate endings. I liked the original one, maybe because the end was quite optimistic although it didn’t really explain anything. The alternate ending (called The End of Evangelion) was created a year later, because the fans didn’t like the original ending. It is longer and explains much more of the details. The last scene left me puzzled though. Yes, I know that the famous last sentence “kimochi warui” is a bit unclear, but that’s probably intentional. What left me more puzzled is the scene before – this might be a bit of a spoiler – I don’t get the strangling. Why did it happen? It leaves me with a very uneasy feeling.
If you do have a clue, please leave a comment. ;-)
Empty Triangle is a great go comics by chidori.
My personal favorites are number 4 (I love it), 6 (how very true), 7 (touching), 8 (love the facial expression), 10 (hey, it’s actually me), 14 (the art in there is just great).
In my humble opinion, Empty Triangle beats all the other go comics (and I’ve seen them all, some of them (such as Almost Sente) are actually pretty good).
By the way, I’ve been to Visegrad tournament (no link to the results, not worth it :S) and master chidori herself drew a great picture on my fan. I am very grateful to her. :)
I’ve been to Animefest the other day. It wasn’t nearly as great as the last year’s one but I still enjoyed it. Here are my impressions:
Otaku no Video – parody of otaku (fanatic manga/anime fans), quite funny. I’ve already seen something similar and find it a bit surprising (in a good way) that these are popular.
Cosplay competition – people dress up as anime characters, some of them were really good.
Claymore – set in medieval times, half-demons fight against demons. Although this description might sound lame, I think it was very nicely done and there were some touching moments too.
Seirei no Moribito was probably my favorite one this year. It’s a fantasy adventure about a prince who is protected by a female warrior against bad guys who want to kill him (in fact these bad guys are not evil, they think they will help him by killing him – it’s complicated). I really liked the graphics and the overall atmosphere.
Kyo no Go no Ni – a school comedy. I bet that you can figure the rest out by yourself. :-)
Actually, I ain’t. I’m more of an agnostic. But it’s a cool quote from Luis Buñuel.
Here, let’s throw a couple random links:
Flame me.
I want to have some real Hex and TwixT boards, so I’ve been playing around with PostScript a bit.
I found Larry Doolittle’s Hex board and started editing it without knowing almost anything about PostScript. The results were – you guessed it – disastrous. PostScript is not really intuitive language (for me, at least). But then I found a great PostScript tutorial, which helped me immensely.
First I edited Larry’s Hex board – I added black outline to two opposite sides (for the sides not to get confused), and scaled and rotated the 13x13 board (which is littlegolem standard, therefore defacto universal standard) so that it’s playable with normal sized go stones and fits on A3 sized paper (I am very happy that it fits). You can download my 13x13 hex board on A3 for use with go stones.
The next thing I needed was a TwixT board. This time I only found a pdf, which was exactly not what I wanted. So, with a lot more help of the PostScript tutorial mentioned earlier, I created a PostScript TwixT board.
I made it to be highly customizable, you can find parameters on lines 10 to 21. You can easily change size of the board (the number of holes), the space between holes, holesize, color of holes, filling of holes, color of the guiding lines (or whatever they are called, you know, those lines that help you choose the right move ;-)), width and color of the border, basic line width, and finally horizontal and vertical offset. I sincerely think all those settings could be quite useful to anyone who wants to print a customized TwixT board.
I agree that the code is not really great (I stay true to the “it was difficult to write, so it should be difficult to read” principle), but it works and I think that’s what counts.
Here is a short example of PostScript language:
1 step mul dup moveto
boardsize 2 div 1 sub step mul bs 2 sub step mul lineto stroke
Which means, rewritten to human language:
move_to(1step, 1step);
draw_line_to((boardsize/2 – 1)step, (bs – 2)step);
In PostScript, everything is based on LIFO (last in first out) stacks, so when you want to do 3+4, you have to write 3 4 add (3 and 4 are put into the stack and the function “add” takes two values from the top of the stack and returns their sum back on the top).
I could show a lot of other PostScript examples but I think it’s better for you to have a look at the code yourself (it’s heavily uncommented, I didn’t want to take the fun out of it).
I think I should create a category called “rant” in my blog.
I think you also read all those funny stories… Secretary: “I have a problem with Windows.” Support: “What do you have on your monitor?” Secretary: “A flowerpot.”
It’s funny as long as it happens to other people, but I get a lot of similar questions while admining on KGS, and believe me — it’s not funny, it’s just very very tiring. :|
The name has been changed to protect the guilty. There is a menu called “Rooms” on KGS, and right in this menu, there is a button called “Open Games”:
leebark: I accindently exited out of open games! How do I get back?
tasuki: Rooms > Open games
leebark: what catogory though?
leebark: main?
tasuki: no room list, no category
tasuki: just click on “Rooms” :)
leebark: I’ve clicked on rooms but it’s not there
leebark: :.[
tasuki: look carefully
tasuki: it’s in the rooms menu here
tasuki: not in the room list
leebark: I got it
leebark: thanks
tasuki: great…
He didn’t even say hello or hi (I respond very reluctantly to users who ask stupid questions and don’t even bother to greet me). He asks me something he could find out by himself, and then fails to follow the directions I give him (he searched in Rooms > Room List > [Various Categories]). I had to repeat it three times for him to get it. :-/
The second one was even worse:
tomoyuki: Please help me, how can I enroll the outcome?
tasuki: go to http://eygml.tasuki.org/
tasuki: log in
tasuki: proceed to the league page
tasuki: find the game in the table, click “sgf”
tasuki: and upload the sgf file of that game
tomoyuki: thank you
[ half an hour of silence ]
tasuki: so will you upload it? :-)
tomoyuki: how can I upload my game?
tomoyuki: from what?
tasuki: the sgf file
tasuki: you can download sgf of a game from kgs by right clicking on it in your gamelist
tomoyuki: It says “The game should have been played between tomoyuki and VincentV but it was played between VincentV and Prodigious.” What can I do?
tasuki: you should upload the game played between tomoyuki and VincentV, NOT the game between VincentV and Prodigious
tasuki: each user can only upload their own games
[ tomoyuki has logged out without uploading the game ]
I think this requires no further explanation. I could upload the game for him, but am I expected to upload all the 250 games that we are going to play in the league? :S
I have enough of people complaining that the game uploading procedure is too difficult (it isn’t, it takes one click to choose which game to upload, one click to select the game file, and one click to actually upload it; could it be any easier?). I have enough of people using different KGS nicks than they chose in their profile (which they can edit anytime) and complaining that they can’t upload their game. I have enough of people writing their nickname in ALL CAPS once and in lower case the other day and being surprised (remember kids: Capitalization is the difference between “I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse.” and “I had to help my uncle jack off a horse.” (if you don’t know what the second one means, good for you)). Just choose one capitalization of your nickname/password and stick with it, mmkay? ^^
Simply put: I don’t enjoy providing free tech support for idiots in my free time. I enjoyed creating the EYGML site, I learned something and created something useful. I think I spent few dozens of hours doing that. Now it’s the users’ turn to do some work (the navigation is intuitive for most people, however, the few who don’t find it intuitive should first try it out, or try thinking, before asking me silly questions).
With love,
tasuki