00:56
And now for something awesome again: a one-man a cappella Pokemon theme! http://music.todaysbigthing.com/2010/06/25

13:16
If I was at all prone to exaggeration, I'd say this is the most depressing image ever.

17:23
http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/2010/07/05/07052010/
This comic strip's last four panels are AWESOME.

13:34
I read two webcomics recently and though I'd plug them a little. One is "FreakAngels" (http://www.freakangels.com/), a comic about post-apocalyptic England. It moves rather slowly at times, but the story is great and the art too, though the style isn't what I'd like best. Another is "Escape from Terra" (http://www.bigheadpress.com/eft), a comic about humanity's future. It has technobabble and sociological speculation! Squee! The stories are great and I only wish the art was a little better. It seems to be getting slowly better though.
I thought it was also worth mentioning that especially the first story arc of "Escape from Terra" reminded me of the worlds in Le Guin's book Dispossessed.

11:32
I had an exceptionally strange dream last night. In it I was watching a movie, and my mom was also there, but as she did nothing and didn't leave, I can only assume that in the dream she fell asleep on the couch behind my couch. Anyway, I was watching this movie about a guy who had apparently gone through a great deal of trouble to apply to be a some kind of soldier in some kind of army. I assumed all of that, because what I saw was that the guy went into some office to be interviewed and checked before he would be accepted. The doctor/interviewer checked him by looking at him and, this being a movie, I saw a disembodied skeleton of the guy showing what exactly was wrong with him since he had to forge something to be considered as an applicant in the first place.
The thing that was wrong was that his humeri were bent different ways. Now, humeri shouldn't have been bent like that at all, but for some reason one of the bendings was the correct form. I just saw yesterday that the femur is considerably more bent (convex when viewed from the front) than I thought and the humeri in the dream were bent the same way as the femur. This guy's other humerus was bent concave from the front and the other convex.
The doctor/interviewer was getting suspicious and would've noticed the bendiness that would get the guy disqualified if the guy HADN'T BROKEN HIS OWN HUMERUS right there and then. For some inexplicable reason the doctor/interviewer didn't notice when the guy did this. Well, now the bone was broken and the doctor/interviewer wasn't so suspicious anymore – save for the fact that now the guy's arm looked really loose and the TV showed a part of some disembodied skeleton with a broken humerus and a few muscles keeping the arm attached. The doctor/interviewer noticed the looseness but still accepted the guy.
The movie progressed and the guy was shown fighting and stuff. With his BROKEN HUMERUS. That somehow didn't really bother him. However, I'm not sure how it happened, but his arm started bleeding and the wounds and pain started getting worse and the guy became really angry and eventually helpless. This all took a very short time, he seemed to go directly from being accepted as a soldier to fighting and he got wounded in only a day, apparently (movie time, for me watching the TV in my dream it took like half a minute).
Then he ended up in some hospital to be fixed. He was really angry and furious and thrashed about childishly when the TV showed an above view of a hospital bed very much full of blood. Now the upper part of his broken humerus was pretty much shattered, and probably some other parts of his shoulder were broken too. I saw plenty of gore and little white bone bits and thought that was a little too much, come on, we already saw that. The skin was gone there and I recall there only being a single twitching muscle keeping the arm attached to the body. And the whole time the TV showed that, the guy screamed and tried to thrash his arm along with his body, but the arm seemed to be stuck. I guess the massive bandages controlled that. Now that I think of it, the scene was somehow like the original Robocop movie, except not quite.
Next the guy was in some isolation ward, some kind of glass room, but apparently in the military area, like he was some kind of dangerous zoo animal. He pretty much acted the part, too. For some inexplicable reason, his arm was nothing but bone (or at least I think so as it wasn't really shown much) but it worked fine. The guy was also hideously self-conscious about that and yelled at everyone childishly to not look at the arm, which was more about the wrongly bent humerus (that hadn't or couldn't have been fixed for whatever reason) than the fact that it was nothing but bone. The arm was healing though, but I don't know how. It also seemed like the guy would return to being a soldier once he healed, which was weird too.
Next to the guy's glassroom there was another glassroom that contained an autistic kid. The autistic kid had exceptional communication skills for someone actually autistic, and didn't care about the guy's arm, so the guy was happy about that.
The guy's parents visited him there and he was childishly reserved with them too. I think the parents were too young to be his parents, but well. The dad tried to alleviate the guy's reservedness by making some gesture that apparently used to alleviate the guy's self-consciousness about his weird bendy humerus when he was a kid: he quickly walked his fingers on some surface and the guy laughed nervously and did the the same. And I watched the TV and thought that was really weird but that it was supposed to be cute.
And then it ended.
TL;DR I had an anatomically incorrect dream about incorrect anatomy where a guy broke his own weird bendy humerus to get accepted as a soldier. Disembodied skeletons, bare bones and an autistic kid were included.

The dream might have connections to a massive discussion about anime and realism (and anatomy) on an IRC channel. And the fact that I looked through an anatomy book yesterday.

21:55
I went to see the movie Kick-ass today. For a comedy, I was surprised at the amount and level of violence, implied and actual. But then again, I guess it was about right for a K-15 movie. Nevertheless, it was pretty good and everything seemed to make sense!

23:58
One of our TV channels (YLE Teema) showed a dramatized series about Estonia's way to independence (well, not all the way, but I think years 1913–1941 anyway) called "Tuulepealne maa". It had 12 parts and the last one just came out today. I remember starting to watch the first episode just because I thought it would be cool to listen to some Estonian. Then the story started getting interesting, and even after the independence war was over and it went more in the direction of human drama, I wanted to keep watching to see what would happen. I've never been too big on history. But this series was good!

22:07
This is truly a fantastic game! http://woodgears.ca/eyeball/index.html

23:31
And then I finished the seventh Harry Potter book too. Yay!

00:23
I finished the sixth book too. I just saw the movie when it came out and damn, nothing of it caught on me and the book was largely a surprise. It was also better than the fifth one, so at least this far the quality has been increasing with the number. Let's hope that holds true for the last one too.

03:07
Damn it's late. Anyway, inspired by the Harry Potter fanfic I told about earlier, I started reading the latter books which I haven't read, just so that I won't be terribly spoilered by the fanfic. Then again, now that I read the fourth book and half of the fifth, I started wondering whether it WOULD be better to read the fanfic first anyway...

23:35
I finished the fifth book too. I think it was better than the fourth, and things sort of make sense now.

13:57
I moved my computer out of my room for the summer since it generates way too much heat. I instantly noticed how much quieter my room is without it! That video card fan sure makes a lot of noise...

19:01
I went and got myself a last.fm account. I guess you could blame peer pressure but it was more like "why not". Anyway: http://www.last.fm/user/Veltzeh

22:13
As amazing as it is, I've been reading a Harry Potter fanfic. I'm not a particular fan of HP – the books are well-written, certainly, but I don't really like the characters nor the holey plot (though I'm pretty good at ignoring that especially when it comes to human flaws). The books are good enough that I want to read them, and I think I'll finally read the four last ones this summer.
Anyway, the fanfic. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is quite excellent in its attempt to bring some sense into the HP universe! It's also well-written and even I can ignore the few missing commas. And the humor is great.

22:16
I went to see Iron Man 2 today. Nice crashing around, though it wasn't exactly exceptional. The social/talking scenes were strange but realistic in a way. Stark nearly always talked over somebody and it amazes me how they keep the massive company from crashing when it sounded like they have nothing but problems...

Also, making video game characters older: http://www.examiner.com/x-7953-Console-Game-Examiner~y2010m5d4-Making-game-characters-more-mature-with-beards

12:53
http://www.thescavenger.net/glbsgdq/1st-sex-and-or-gender-diversity-day-26-april-72456.html I think that's more cheerful than the "remembering our dead" thing on the 20th of November. I suppose I'll have an online picnic. Have some cookies!

20:12
I started reading the Keychain of Creation webcomic. I tried a couple of times a few years back, but back then I had no clue about the Exalted game system, which was what I needed to become interested in the comic. Anyway, lol! http://keychain.patternspider.net/archive/koc0201.html

18:05
My brain feels sort of warm and fuzzy. I just finished reading this unfinished Harry Potter fan fiction: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
It is rather awesome and intellectually stimulating, though I don't think I actually read anything (scientific) in there that would have been new for me.

01:06
I went to see H. R. Giger's Alien exhibit in Tampere art museum some days ago. It was pretty interesting and all the art was pretty cool. And apparently I don't have anything more intelligent to say at the moment... cough.

21:59
Regarding the wound I typed about in <blog:1105208>; it left quite a nice scar. It's red and all, and might eventually fade away. By now I also have plenty of similar-looking but much more superficial scratches from cat claws. Those damn buggers lull me into a sense of false security with their cuteness and then strike...

I finished watching Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis in February. Good series!

I've been updating Veltzeh's reading list.

Yet another awesome song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3q7lwl5nSQ (Intergalactic Space Crusaders)!

00:12
I think this link came from a nanowrimo channel. I thought it was awesome. http://www.salmiyuck.com/ (following http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Souvenir-Potpourri-Salmiak-Attack.aspx)
This was also awesome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FpMo9JGlxo (The Eye of Ra).
Hmm, it seems like it's my birthday tomorrow.

20:45
Here's an interesting post: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats.html
I'm one of those who can program and I find it pretty easy. I never really thought much about it until I took a course called utilization of data structures (and I'm sure I've mentioned that before too). On the course, we were supposed to find algorithms most efficient at searching or sorting. They said that the first, intuitive guess at the algorithm would never be the best, but I always got it "right" on my first guess for some reason. Then again, it could've been because I actually thought about it and didn't just go "oh, linear sort is always the best way to go".
Programming is like grammar and laws. I'm good at following their rules, be they "meaningless" or not. :D