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. :-P

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. ;-)

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?