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.

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!