Turukhtan

Friday, July 22, 2005

New Hairy Poll

I just moved my old Hairy Survey to Mister Poll. I've changed it a bit, so everyone who has already taken the old version is welcome to take this new version! (Yes, I changed it so I couldn't be bothered with entering the old results from the old poll ... I'm too lazy and too busy.)

http://www.misterpoll.com/319425346.html

You can also comment and discuss the poll. Yay!

Posted at 5:43 pm by turukhtan
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Tuesday, July 19, 2005

The joys of being a newspaper distributor

One of the joys of working as a newspaper distributor is that you are awake at a time when only you, security guards, policemen and crazy (i.e. drunk, usually) people roam the empty streets.

Today, as I was biking through central Lund towards my district in the north, someone threw something at me from a car. I just felt something bounce against my hand, and heard the loud laughing of a woman from the car that had just passed me by. I have no idea what it was they threw at me, and it didn’t hurt or scare me anyway, so the woman was really laughing for no reason ... Ho hum.

Another joy is that you're one of the first people who get to read the newspapers. Today I read about how the demonstrators in Netivot, protesting against the pullout from the Gaza Strip, have chosen orange as their colour, 'inspired' by Yuschenko’s movement in Ukraine. It made me laugh out loud in the elevator. Orange seems to be the new colour of choice for anyone who wants to create the impression that they are fighting for 'freedom', 'justice' and other empty clichés.

Other Israelis are protesting against the protests by not buying orange clothes, although the colour is fashionable this summer ... Read the full article at Haaretz.

Posted at 2:07 pm by turukhtan
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Friday, July 15, 2005

A dream of menstruation in Sin City

I was Shellie, who in Sin City is a barmaid, harrassed by her ex-boyfriend and his gang. In the comic (and the film) she is saved by her new boyfriend Dwight, who in a memorable scene says he’s "out of his mind". In my dream, however, I/Shellie didn’t need any new boyfriend, because I was quite able to kick their asses by myself.
It was all somehow set in my family’s old apartment in Hannover, which had been redecorated to suit the atmosphere better. A particularly interesting sequence from the fight was when I took out my bloody tampon, grabbed the head of my ex, stuffed the tampon into his mouth and tied up his jaw so he couldn’t spit it out ...

When I woke up I had just gotten my period.

Posted at 12:18 pm by turukhtan
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Friday, July 08, 2005

What video game character am I?

What Video Game Character Are You? I am Kung Fu Master.

I am Kung Fu Master.

I like to be in control of myself. I dislike crowds, especially crowds containing people trying to kill me. Even though I always win, I prefer to avoid fights if possible. What Video Game Character Are You?

I have to confess I've never played kung fu video games. But my second highest score was for this:

What Video Game Character Are You? I am a Scorched Earth Tank.

I am a Scorched Earth Tank.

When I have a mission, it consumes me; I will not be satisfied until the job is done. I have a strong sense of duty, and a strong sense of direction. Changes in the tide don't phase me - I always know which way the wind blows, and I know how to compensate for it. I get on poorly with people like myself. What Video Game Character Are You?

And yes, I have played that game. A lot ...

Posted at 7:59 am by turukhtan
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Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Yukata madness

On Sunday, when I was on my much too short visit with mum and the hairy children, we put on our yukatas and went strolling around on Stenungsund's seaside promenade with Mitsu.

This is how cool we were looking.

Or, if the root folder is annoying, check out the Flickr set ...

Posted at 11:40 am by turukhtan
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Thursday, June 30, 2005

Yay, I landed a job!!!

Thanks to the wonderful thing called "chance", I got a job as newspaper distributor, after all.

All places had been filled already, but then one person backed out. I had sent in two applications - first, I only applied for the summer, and then I realised that I could work until October 31st, so I sent in another application - and that's how they set their eyes on me.

So, the age of *really* early mornings (wakey-wakey at 2 o'clock) has come!

I'm actually looking forward to it. I suppose I'll get used to it after a while, and I do like being awake when everyone else is asleep. Besides, this is one of the few minimum wage jobs where you can work all alone.

I got a cool pair of gloves and a knife (made in Finland, of course), and on Wednesday next week I'll be joining uncle Ali as an appentice the first three times.

By the way, this might be my great entrance into the world of newspapers and publishing! He he. Just like Busca-Pé in Cidade de Deus always said: if you want to do something, you should start from the bottom. He wanted to be a photographer, so he started out with the cheapest camera, and he wanted to work at a newspaper, so he started out as a newspaper distributor ...

Posted at 10:20 am by turukhtan
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Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Okay ...

Maybe I should try to do something more constructive now that I'll be all alone for the next two weeks, as Mihai has gone to Austria to research for his case study. Draw comics, for instance.

I guess my recent soar in blogging activity is somehow related to his absence. When he's here, I don't write too much in this blog, but when he isn't (right now, and before he came to Sweden), I write much more.

Argh, so does that make all my intellectual activity some kind of urge to get attention from my boyfriend, i.e. the opposite sex, i.e. to procreate?! Well, according to Richard Dawkins and his book "The Selfish Gene", that's exactly how it works for all species (and both/all sexes, obviously).

Well, it might very well be so, to a certain extent. But it's like everything else in natural sciences: it may be able to explain all the tiniest little details about our physical existence, but it still doesn't say anything about the feelings I have right now.

For instance, it's possible to medically explain exactly what happens when a person dies, but that doesn't make people fear death any less, does it?

Posted at 5:09 pm by turukhtan
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Appleseed

A frame I didn't notice the first 2-3 times I read Appleseed #1. (Hitomi wants to take the guys for a ride - Deunan with her on the bike, Briareos in a cab - but they don't trust her yet, and Deunan makes a piggy-face ...)

I like the comic a lot, and while I thought the animation was really cool, as well, it was a bit disappointing how simplified it was, and how the characters had been squeezed into more 'mainstreamish' frames (not to mention silly miniskirts).

I haven't read the fourth Appleseed book, so I can't say so much about the difference in the general plot. Briareos had a slightly different personal history in the anime, which on one hand was good, because it actually gave an explanation to why he is a cyborg. On the other hand, it created a lot of tension and lack of tenderness between him and Deunan in the beginning, which was too bad ó_ò ... they are such a sweet couple.

The things that were better in the anime than in the manga were (a) the fight scenes, especially the opening scene, and (b) the music (obviously!). Well, not that I'd listen to that kind of music normally, but it fit well with the atmosphere in the film.

¤ ¤ ¤

As for other creations of Shirow-sensei, I don't really like Ghost in the Shell book 2. Everything I slightly disliked in GitS #1 is multiplied a thousand times in the second book. Too bad, since most of Shirow's earlier works are among my very favourite comics.

Posted at 4:17 pm by turukhtan
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Monday, June 27, 2005

A character I hope I'll be drawing a comic about some day ...

Albita (or whatever I'll eventually end up calling her) was born in a brothel somewhere in the Caribbean, where everyone except her mother was convinced that she was the devil itself. She was nine years old when her mother was killed by a customer, and some people in the house wanted to finally kill Albita, too, while the owner wanted her to take her mother's place. She ran away, and ended up in a circus, first appearing as a 'freak', then as an assistant to various artists, and finally as a sword swallower in her very own show.

Unfortunately, most people with albinism don't have red eyes, so I can't make her have that. It's already bad enough that her hair and complexion are so white, because most black people with albinism have a rather 'golden' complexion, and their hair is more yellow or light brown than white. Oh well. But maybe her father was white?

Cool people with albinism:

http://www.rickguidotti.com/main.htm

Posted at 2:07 am by turukhtan
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Sunday, June 26, 2005

My dreams are so nice sometimes.

Yesterday morning I had an interesting dream, where I was a young police woman working in the Russian countryside. We got a call from a woman who said her husband had gone missing, and she was suspecting that a neighbour they had been quarrelling with had shot him in the forest. We went out to investigate, and found that the woman lived in a small house in the middle of nowhere with thick woods around her house (which kind of looked like the house where my grandma used to live, only a bit bigger).

It was a quite long and complex dream that made surprisingly much sense. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten a lot of the stuff in the middle, but it all came down to that we started to suspect that the woman was not telling the whole truth, because there were little things that didn’t quite make sense when you thought about it more closely.

For instance, we noticed she had been making repairs in the house that she couldn’t give any sensible explanation to. One of them was that she had laid out a new floor in one part of a room.

We broke up the new floor in that room, and it turned out that there was some kind of sealed compartment underneath it. As we broke up more of the floor, the first thing that appeared was a human leg, that looked as if it had been gnawed on quite a lot.

Soon, something else appeared. A teenage boy, looking slightly mad and squinting in the light, with blood smeared around his mouth. As he scrambled up on his elbows, he giggled: “If I hadn’t eaten him, I’d have been dead by now!”

As it turned out, the leg belonged to the woman’s late husband. The teenager was a lifter she had picked up once and offered to come have dinner at her place and spend the night. She had then knocked him unconscious and dragged him into the space under the floor, thinking he was dead.

I woke up before we got to know more about the woman’s motives, and why she had called the police when she herself was guilty. But I’m suspecting that she might have split personalities, of which one was murdering people, while the other didn’t know anything about it, and had somehow projected the subconscious sense of the murder on the neighbours ...

Posted at 9:42 pm by turukhtan
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