Getting them too?

It’s usually someone whose whole family was brutally killed and left several millions (or milliards) dollars. The person is in danger and has to transfer money to a safe place, you are the one to help him – you just have to send some kind of small fee like $80, well, who cares when you are to recieve several millions soon? ;-)

I stumbled upon a story of a psychotherapist who fell for the nigerian scam. Well, simply put, he’s an idiot and I think he deserves what he got (now you might find this a bit harsh, but sending money to someone repeatedly without ever getting anything back seems pretty stupid to me).

There are actually quite a lot of people who enjoy pretending they are stupid and playing around with the scammers, some of them are pretty succesful in ridiculing the scammers and few even managed to get money from them (duh, some of the scammers must be real dumb if they let others scam ’em too). The 419 eater site collects the letters and various stuff, some of which is pretty funny (such as the guy who posed with a loaf of bread on his head and bottle of wine in his mouth (you can read the whole story too)).

Well, there is a lot of funny reading for long winter nights, scammers seem pretty active but so do scambaiters…

I came in first in yesterday’s empathy game (czech only, sorry). That’s quite a good result considering that my empathy level is pretty low and that I only spent a minute or so thinking about the words (but maybe it’s actually better this way).

Operanda made this empathy game inspired by littlegolem’s empathy game, with the only practical difference that this one is in czech.
Well, it’s a cheap link just for letting me win, isn’t it? ;-)

Xiao xiao is a series of wonderful stick fighting animations/games. This one is probably the best (the hero crushes dozens of bad guys in a very spectacular way), but all are worth watching.

What a short post. :)

I haven’t ridden a bike for several months (since winter, more exactly (you might find it weird but I don’t)). Today we made a small ride which ended being slightly more than 100km long. Of course my legs hurt, but what I find more surprising is that my wrists do too. Of course the seat is now imprinted into my butt, which ain’t nice either…

And this happened just a day after almost sleepless night… As I’ve already written, I was at the animefest, here is more or less chronologically what I’ve seen there (and some of my impressions):

Great teacher Onizuka – A comedy about a former leader of a motorcycle gang who decides to become a teacher. It was probably stupid, but I really liked it (maybe because I haven’t seen any anime for quite a long time.

AMV competition (see, I am nice enough to put links to wikipedia again) – that ruled, I wonder whether you can dload the AMVs anywhere on the net. Probably the best one was on Neon Genesis Evangelion (which is prolly most classic/widely known/talked about anime) with self recorded version of a widely known pop song (I don’t know the name) with refrain: “We’ve been lonely for most of our lives, and through Impact into paradise”

Grave of the fireflies – the most touching anime, it’s about a boy and his sister who become orphans and try to survive WW2 in Japan. I highly suggest it, the best one I’ve seen this year.

Karas – what a bullsh^HH^HH^HH^H difficult story. There were demons fighting each other and sometimes killing random people (some of them got power from drinking human blood). I liked one scene, which was rather good: a girl was at a toilette, when suddenly in the wash basin the water drops started falling the other way around (needless to say she didn’t survive it).

Memories – three short stories, I’ve only seen two of them but liked both:
Magnetic rose – scifi, space dustmen catch an SOS signal from wrecks of old starships, they find a gothic looking rooms there, as they get deeper, there are some nasty surprises, then they start to see unreal things (and is a bit like Solaris (if you haven’t read it yet, go and do it NOW)
Stink bomb – a boy in a chemistry lab eats something he shouldn’t have eaten, then starts producing something that causes everyone who gets close to him to fall into coma (he doesn’t know that and is always very surprised). I really liked it.

Bokusatsu tenshi Dokuro-chan – quite an average girl (going to school and so on) who is accidentally also an angel very often brutally kills her friend with a spiked club to revive him a few moments later. It’s pretty crazy comedy, but considering the state we were in, we really enjoyed it.

Sokyu no Fafner – yet another mecha fighting (well, ever seen a mecha doing anything else than fighting?), not that bad, but mecha ain’t my style.

Genshiken – anime about otaku (anime freaks), it went on for 5 hours (since 2 till 7, so I overslept a few parts, but Genshiken didn’t have a clear storyline so it doesn’t even matter much). The only drawback is that the sound was really loud so it was a bit difficult to sleep.

Ginban Kaleidoscope – a speedskater meets a ghost, big deal…

Speed grapher – a photograph gets into trouble in a world where money is everything, I’ve only seen a few first parts so I couldn’t understand it much but I think it might be a good one.

Fate/Stay night – wizards fighting for a holy grail, lots of action.

Ooh, I almost forgot again… you like pictures, don’t you? :-)

Geez, this was a long one…

At the animefest I’ve seen this flash animation with wonderful music. Janisska sent me the link earlier but I wasn’t able to get the sound running in linux.

I made a bit of searching and found full version of the song.

WARNING: Majority of people (including me) finds the song highly addictive.

Post edit: I found lyrics (both original and english translation)!

I am going to spend the weekend at animefest, annual event held in Brno that is all about manga and anime (too lazy to put links to wikipedia, you’ve got to search for it yourself :-)).

I’ve been there last year and really liked it, so I hope this year won’t be much different. Well, gonna sleep now as I will have to get up early tomorrow (errm… today).

How do small children learn their mother tongue? They can use no dictionaries, no handbooks, noone can explain them, simply because they don’t know any language yet. They learn by listening and imitating.

That’s the approach I decided to use too. I’ve been reading Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (thanks to Drc for lending me) and I haven’t used a dictionary although there are plenty of words I don’t understand. When I get to such a word, I try to guess its meaning, on the next occurence, it gets more accurate, when I see the word ten times in different sentences I usually understand pretty well what it means. I think this approach is generally slower than using a dictionary, but it offers much deeper understanding. Although, I have to admit, there are some dictionaries, that are pretty good.

As my random thoughts go, I usually skip between various things when writing a post:
I find extensive use of the word “cry” meaning “shout” quite funny. I was taught that crying is the process of making tears, so, when I read “blah blah blah, cried Gandalf”, it always confuses me. Is it used like that in contemporary english?

My handicap go skills (now talking about me giving stones to others, I am not on the recieving end very often if at all) always lacked something, for whatever reason I used to be totally unable to play the “correct” handicap, strugling with handicap reduced by two stones. Lately, playing in the tearoom (told ya about it already) seems to have improved my handicap skills quite a lot. We change handicap after each game in appropriate direction by one stone, here are my results:

I was able to force 1kyu (Ondra Kruml) down to 6 handicap (which I lost, but it wasn’t that desperate as one could expect), well, he got back to 3 handi, but now he is at 4 handicap again, I succesfully dodge his attacks to try to get to an even game :)

Now even more funny, I managed to get a 2dan (Písa) down to 4 handicap (we were starting at 2 handicap, which is the “correct” one), and while I had the better of it already, after some blunders from both of us he won. Nevertheless, I won the 3 handi we played then and I’m looking forward to put up a fight next weekend in a 4 handicap again.

I am really happy that my handicap go improved this much, now I will hopefully be able to slay some kyu players who always thought too high of themselves in the correct (or higher) handicap.

And, a bit of what I’ve learned:

• in the fuseki, spread your stones all over the board (the higher the handicap the more this applies), never play anything completely out (if possible), the sucker will be confused and won’t know what to do
• play nonstandard moves, the suckers often know joseki, you gain everytime you play something wrong that no one knows (as you are able to read much deeper)
• sacrifice small groups for sente (I can’t stress this enough probably, it is utterly important), the sucker will spend a few gote moves to kill it and probably choose wrong ones so you might be able to live later
• be bold, but not completely unreasonable, if you see your trick move responded correctly, don’t hesitate to make tenuki (the aji is better left for later)
• influence is worth five times it’s real value in handicap games (either it will help you kill something or you will get a huge territory, the sucker will be afraid)
• if you know what your sucker is afraid of, just play it whether it works or not, the psychological gain is usually huge; also, when you do that, it helps to ask over-anxiously “are you afraid?”, this will put him under pressure and he’ll either play something really safe or decide to punish you by an unreasonable overplay

As a side note, the term sucker is meant relatively here and I leave it up to you which advice was meant seriously.

I’ve been listening to some classical music lately, so here are my impressions:

Tchaikovsky: Nutcracker and Swan lake, both are great, the music is very lively.
Mozart: Requiem, ultimately boring, I didn’t like it at all.
Vivaldi: Some concert, well, better than Requiem (if that means anything).

But, Tchaikovsky rulez…

I used to use tasuki@volny.cz, then got tasuki@seznam.cz for registering to suspicious places that could send me spam, and two years ago or so I switched to vit.brunner@gmail.com. I still forwarded the two previous emails there, as sometimes someone sent me something there, but lately I found out that I am more or less only forwarding spam.

Now I recieved about one spam every hour (yeah, I know, it’s still not that bad), so I decided it was the right time to cancel the redirects, so, the old adresses don’t work anymore, use the new one.

There’s no point to this post, just an announcement or something like that.