22:15
I finally managed to finish Neverwinter Nights 2. I'd left it hanging near the end for one reason or another. I also think I didn't kill that one dragon because it was too tough and immune to sneak attacks, oh woe. Nevertheless, it is finished now! I think I shall play it again some day. I wonder if I could kill some party members...

01:39
Today/yesterday I felt for the first time that I might actually be ready to face whatever adolescence would bring. Yes, I'm aware that I'm a day short of being 25 at the moment. Why, oh why can't adolescence be postponed to a time when one actually is ready? Then again, the fact that I think I'm ready now could be influenced by my knowing of what would happen.

In other news, I drew a rather successful picture:

22:06
The editorial of this comic: http://egscomics.com/egsnp/?date=2010-02-16 brings up a point about criticism that I've been wanting to write about.

Also, the webcomic in general is great. :D

01:05
I finished my 30 characters! You can check them out here if you want to: Veltzeh's 30 characters 2010.

In other news, our house is having a small cold-related crisis. During the Monday-Tuesday night, a bunch of the power network inside the house stopped working. It worked fine when I went to bed, but now neither my nor my parents' room has any heat or light, though miraculously the one socket where my computer is is powered. Also the socket in the warehouse stopped working, so the freezers are on an extension cord. Some heating elements aren't working in the living room, plus one socket is dead there too. Also the dishwasher didn't seem to work, and only a part of the oven works. Interesting, isn't it?

17:43
http://www.transgenderdor.org/ Yep.

23:09
As some may know, it is NaNoWriMo time. This year, I'm not doing an actual novel, but an alternative: 30 characters in 30 days (<URL:http://www.30characters.com/>). I've gathered my characters at Veltzeh's 30 characters 2010 if anyone wants to see.
In other news, I finally got the photos of the new cat out of the camera, but now my network hard drive is being an ass and not letting me access the photos.

However, the point of this post is not the fact that I'm not filling out the character sheets I made. The point is that I've realized something about swearing and can put it in words now.
This past year, I've started noticing how swearing just gradually got more inconvenient, extraneous and juvenile. I can't say what kind of swearer I've been and while I've let out my share of profanities, I do know that I've almost never used the strongest swearwords Finnish has. I definitely used to think that swearing was cool and totally acceptable in certain situations even though I didn't actually swear quite that much myself.
Of course I don't think swearing should be banned, but I've come to notice that when people swear, most often it just isn't doing anything for them except making them seem less amicable, approachable, trustworthy and mature. When I see or hear someone swearing, these questions pop into my mind:
1) What's that supposed to signify?
2) Is that really the only way to express feelings, and what warrants such feelings anyway?
3) Is anyone going to get offended? (Well, the purpose of swearwords and profanity IS to offend or express pain or surprise.)
4) Why does the swearer want to offend?
I suppose there are more questions to be asked but those were the most consice and clear ones of which I thought.
I've gotten pretty tired of swearing and wish other people would give it a rest too. It still has its place, but ideally people would think about what their swearing signifies and save it for the hopefully not-that-frequent situations that can somehow benefit from swearing. Nowadays too many swearing situations just invoke the aforementioned feelings of immaturity and unapproachcability in me.

00:21
I have a role-playing game idea! I'm not entirely sure where to go with it, mostly because I want to actually offer a good starting point for the players, but the starting point is changeable. So yeah. Kyerrion game.

00:24
I also finally saw Inception yesterday, after only two months of planning to go see it. It was pretty good and visually awesome, but not remarkably memorable. The varying gravity and weightless fighting part was really cool.

15:46
I've taken photos of the cat. Maybe some day I'll also take them out of the camera. In other news, winter tire season has begun. I also had a massive headache on Thursday, though usually I don't really have headaches even when I'm ill. Luckily it didn't develop into a flu.

23:28
The new cat seems to have gotten over its pee-y phase. It was excessively friendly on Saturday or Friday night, and has kept on being friendly. Savu doesn't approve, of course. The new one also seems to have gotten the name of Plushenko or Pljuštšenko, however one would like to transliterate. The reason behind that one is that whenever the cat tries to run on the parquet floor, it slides and slips because it has fluffy hair on its paws.
I need to take some photos of it some day. It is very cute. :3

23:01
Key picked up a new cat on Monday. It had very stinky pee and felt alienated from the cat toilet, so now the whole house stinks. It was neutered today, so I shall hope it will be less pee-y from now on! It got dubbed Mörkö for reasons of which I'm not quite sure yet. X)

10:34
I thought I'd write something more about the cat.

We called the cat Lymy because it was shy and could hide extremely well. We couldn't find it if it didn't want to be found. Another name suggestion that I liked was Tuhka (Ash), from a phrase "tuhkana tuuleen" ("ash into the wind"), as opposed to "savuna ilmaan" ("smoke into the air") since the other cat is called Savu. There are probably better English equivalents for those phrases, but I don't remember them.
Lymy was very thin, would have fought fiercely for ham and lifted its backside high if one petted the root of its tail. Sometimes it rolled around during the petting and pushed the floor with its head. Lymy actually liked to be petted against the direction of growth of its fur. (I really couldn't find a translation for "vastakarvaan".) Lymy's tail was epic.

Here's one of the first photos of Lymy after it dared to venture out of its hiding place. I think I'll upload more once I get them out of my camera.


2010-09-18 21:24
I uploaded more photos. As you can see, Lymy was very good at curling up.


This is the last spot Lymy slept in, the night before its final trip to the vet.

17:02
Our third cat had to be euthanized because of a bad kidney failure. (For the record, the first cat is still around and the second has a new home at my granny's because it was such an efficient hunter.) I didn't even remember how incredibly sad a pet's death is. This is probably why I decided to never get another pet.

I watched Silent Running a while ago, and it was pretty good. Especially the songs were nice.

23:01
What do you get when you combine the oldest topic of discussion (weather) and toilet humor? Something AWESOMELY funny. Cough. Yeah. Apparently one is never too old for toilet humor. Then again, we were pretty tired at that point, so that might've been a very important factor. Poop lightning and salami raining down are synonymous.

00:50
YLE Teema has been showing old sci-fi movies during the summer, and I've been watching them. The movies this far that I've seen were Tulevia aikoja (Things to Come), Metropolis, Kielletty planeetta (Forbidden Planet), Mies joka kutistui (The Incredible Shrinking Man), Varastetut ihmiset (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Alphaville. I've still yet to see some of them.
They're very old as movies, but they are good, watchable and not necessarily even headbangingly wrong. Except Alphaville, that is. It was awful and just didn't make sense at all. I did manage to get what the big point of the movie was, though.

In addition, Teema showed the movie "Det Sjunde Inseglet" (Seventh Seal) some time ago. I was surprised at how awesome the chant by the cultists was. If you want to hear, it starts here at 6:58: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN7bow0TeGQ and apparently it's Dies Irae. I tried to look for other, more high quality versions of it, mostly on Youtube, but all the other versions feel incredibly soulless. Seriously, it's "Day of Wrath" and the singing sounds like they're talking about dreamy pillows in heaven or something. How did the Swedes make it so awesome in the film?

23:44
I heard some family members laughing at a sports interview (apparently it's time for the olympics). My dad said that it's weird that Brits are usually said to be the masters of understatement, when in fact it should be the Finns. Here's the interview that inspired it:
Reporter: "Miltä tuntui tulla seitsemänneksi?" ("How did it feel to come out as seventh?")
Long jumper: "No ei se aivan perseestä ollu." ("Well, it didn't completely suck ass.")

The interview is pretty great, isn't it?

01:00
The horror! THE HORROR! DX

12:44
Plugging this game is popular, so I might as well. X-Men RP needs new active (1 post per day is enough) players! I dare say that new players don't need to even know anything about X-Men. The only noteworthy things are that the characters we play are mostly teens who are mutants and have manifested superhuman powers, and now they're going to a school for such people. And they're discriminated and hunted by regular humans.

In other news, today's weather has been refreshingly cool! I hope it won't get any warmer.

I watched a movie called "Willow" a few days back. I also read a comic adaptation of "The Hobbit" in the city library a week or so ago. I thought I had something to say about them, but apparently I don't. Oh well. Either way, they were fairly good, and Gandalf was quite a jerk.

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.