Turukhtan

Friday, December 30, 2005

Furry little puppies

About a week ago, we went to visit an acquaintance of my mum, who has puppies.

Here are the parents - Sasha, a West-Siberian Laika, and Lakko, a Finnish Spitz, both hunting dogs, though the multi-talent Lakko knows how to herd cattle, as well.

Their puppies were absolutely irresistible.

They stay with the four big dogs in the kennels. Unfortunately, the owner seems to be too busy with his hunting and other capitalist activities to clean up the kennels every day, so the poor little doggies have to run around in shit ...

Posted at 8:03 pm by turukhtan
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Snow and a sleeping little baby

Posted at 7:52 pm by turukhtan
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Monday, December 26, 2005

Serilda

When my old fake leather pants wore out, I was really excited, because now I had material for making a leather pig called Serilda (this old germanic name means 'armed maiden of war').

I assembled a studded necklace and some cheap silver earrings for piercings and went to work. And here she is:

I let Sergei get aquainted with Serilda (he is the adoptive father of all my toy pigs).

He wasn't really all that interested, but Serilda looked like she wanted to challenge him to a bout of kung fu. Ah, the rebellious youth ... always sticking up against their parents.

I wonder how Serilda will get along with Sergei Jr., Severiina and Serpieri.

Posted at 12:47 pm by turukhtan
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Wednesday, December 21, 2005

The Stalin purges - a gendercide?

Interestingly enough, gendercide.org labels Stalin's purges in the 1930's as "gendercide", because they targeted primarily men.

Of course, something like this would never have occurred to the average non-gender conscious historian, who assumes that if something happens primarily to men, it's a genocide, while in the cases when something happens primarily to women, they are much more willing to label it a 'gendercide'. (An example of the latter would be the witch hunts in Europe 1450-1750, where it is estimated that 40.000-60.000 people were executed, of whom only 20-25% were male.)

Posted at 9:04 am by turukhtan
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Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Standing on eggshells

Inspired by Chris Crudelli's BBC program "Mind, Body and Kick Ass Moves", I went against the warning text that appears at the beginning of each episode, and tried one of the tricks featured in the program ...

Here is the video. (9.3 MB, .wmv) If you don't right-click the link and choose 'save target as', I will unleash the wild sows of the ancient bloody forests on you. Help me save bandwidth, dammit.

I regret having filmed myself with the camera in a vertical position. Windows Movie Maker distorted the picture and made me considerably shorter and broader ...

Posted at 1:51 am by turukhtan
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Monday, December 12, 2005

Stupid BlogDrive

You might have noticed the imbecillic text ads that once in a while appear at the bottom of my posts. Well, apparently the people at Blogdrive are "testing a few new ad delivery concepts, intermittently on 50% of the blogs". They "have not committed yet", though, so there is hope that they will be gone.

If they stay, I'll definitely move this blog somewhere else. Because it's fucking insulting to turn my blog entries into commercials.

Posted at 7:31 am by turukhtan
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Saturday, December 10, 2005

What I would want to do before potentially being exterminatd by Apophis

Recently, an asteroid on a potential collision course with Earth has ben discovered. If it would indeed impact, it would "release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. Thousands of square kilometres would be directly affected by the blast but the whole of the Earth would see the effects of the dust released into the atmosphere".

The other day, mum asked what I'd like to have done before 2036. I said I would like to have finished as many as possible of my comic projects.
"But they'll be destroyed anyway if the asteroid hits the area where they are!", mum said.
"I'll just have to make copies of them and have them stored in different continents!", I exclaimed.

Now that I think about it, it would make a cool idea for a post-apocalyptic story: I would survive, but the stash of comics closest to me would have been destroyed. I would go on a journey to retrieve the remaining stashes of comics, while the Earth would have been plunged into chaos and nuclear winter.

Posted at 4:15 pm by turukhtan
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Friday, December 09, 2005

Link of the day

The 'Defending our Oceans' voyage that two ships of the Greenpeace fleet have embarked upon is the single largest expedition that Greenpeace has ever undertaken. It's a year-long journey that will investigate "the crisis facing our oceans from the Azores to Antarctica, take you to places few humans have been, confront the villains and promote solutions".

Some crew members on the Esperanza and the Arctic Sunrise keep a frequently updated blog, and I find it really interesting. It can tell you a lot about the life at sea. I just had to include the following quote here, because it has a funny metaphor:

"... Every time we get sent rolling to one side [by a wave] it's a sure bet we'll rock almost as far the other way, so water comes aboard on one side, runs the deck like a pack of crazed pigs and dumps out the scuppers on the other side: if you happen to be out on the deck when that happens, if you aren't quick enough to hop on top of something on deck you'll end up with deck boots full of icy water."

If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding the metaphor, I have a clue for you ... here is how to say it in US American sign language:

Apparently, sign language is also not free from speciesism: "The fingers do not 'wiggle'. They bend and unbend from the large knuckles. If you 'wiggle' the fingers it means 'dirty'."

Posted at 4:03 pm by turukhtan
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Thursday, December 08, 2005

Dammit.

I'm currently fighting with finishing the fourth comic about Eva, Glass Rain, in order to be able to publish Tunguska #5 before the year 2005 has ended.

Meanwhile, the extra comic that will accompany Driftwood in issue #6 - Pigs Have Wings - has been finished a long time ago. I originally drew it for a manga contest this autumn.

I'm really having trouble with Glass Rain, as it's kind of complex and tricky. So, today I asked myself whether it wouldn't be easier to just switch places between Pigs Have Wings and Glass Rain, and have the former in #5 and the latter in #6 ...

The reasons why I hadn't considered this earlier were the following:

a) Glass Rain is longer than Pigs Have Wings, and Driftwood chapter 5 (in #5) is shorter than chapter 6. If I put Pigs Have Wings in issue 5 with Driftwood chapter 5, Tunguska # 5 would be thinner (50 pages or so), while Tunguska #6 would be really thick (70 pages minimum).

b) I've already drawn the cover for #5, and it has Eva on it.

c) I thought I would be able to publish issue 5 much sooner, and if I'd have included Pigs Have Wings, it would have breached against the rule in the manga contest about the entry not having been published anywhere previously.

But then, (c) is irrelevant now, and (b) is easily solved if I redraw the '#5' on the cover into '#6', and draw a new cover for #5 ...
(a) remains slightly problematic, but I've had previous issues being both very thin and very thick, so it doesn't really matter anyway.

Yay ... so if I switch these two comics, I can suddenly work on Glass Rain without any stress (for instance, I can finish it during the Christmas holidays at mum's place). And all my poor neglected fans (okay, the two of them) will finally get their long-awaited fifth issues.

Phew.

Posted at 11:17 pm by turukhtan
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Yesterday, I had hours of mindless fun.

I came across "the world's first applications to apply the scientifically advanced technologies of face detection and recognition to family history and to consumer photos".

Here are the results ...

Posted at 9:49 pm by turukhtan
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