I hate people who shove their religion in my face. I really hate them. You express something that might disagree with their views, and bam, "Oh, no, you are wrong. I'll pray for you, that God might enlighten you." Or somebody makes a random comment about, say, the bad situation in India, and the reply is, "Oh, if they believed in God, they wouldn't be so unlucky". Stuff like that does not have any place in a coherent, mature, intelligent discussion. That's not discussing. That's refusing to accept opposing views and opinions, and rejecting them, and being insulting. That's shoving your religion in other people's face. That's really disgusting, actually. It's like the person is considering anybody with a different belief worthless.
It's like nails on the blackboard of my soul. Whatever happened to tolerance?

"When my 12 year old daughter asked for this for her birthday, I kind of wondered if she was too old for it, but she seems to LOVE it. Her friends love it too! They play for hours in her bedroom with this great toy. They really seem to like the special effects it offers (the sound effects and vibrating). My oldest daughter (17) really likes it too! I reccomend (sic) this for all children."
The toy in question being, of course, the Harry Potter Nimbus 2000 broom.
Either that reviewer's a little too innocent, or s/he's being funny on purpose. Heh heh heh.

"British wildlife experts are mourning the loss of Kerry the goose after tracking him by satellite all the way from Ireland to an Eskimo's kitchen in Arctic Canada." Hehe... am I the only one who finds that amusing?

The RIAA site was hacked. Here's what was done.
XD 0wned. Hahaha.

Added a wishlist for ThinkGeek to the sidebar. Just because I'm a sucker for cool stuff like that. ^^;
(And if Despair Inc. had a wishlist function, you'd bet I'd have one too. Even if I can get some stuff from them from ThinkGeek.
Damn, I wish they had a Burnout poster, and not just a desktopper and cards. That one is so me. Yeah, I know they have framed miniprints, but they aren't the same thing. Guess I'll have to make do with the desktopper, if I ever get one.)

Well, well... messages in crop circles. Heh. Cute. :p

Okay. There's an auction at Ebay for the AIM screenname of "Satan". The bid is currently up to $15,099.
...
I don't think I can find anything witty to say to that. It comments itself, really.
(Want a l33t AIM screenname, but can't afford that one? Other ones, such as Huge Cock, go for less.)

The Invisible Library "is a collection of books that only appear in other books". Rather interesting. :)

Oh, and paper shuriken 0wn j00. (Two links in there.)
I haven't tried the 8-piece version from the second page yet, probably never will, and I'm not going to dare attempt making the one-piece shuriken from the first page. Way too complex for my poor origami skills. The two-piece one is more than enough. I've experimented with materials a bit: regular printer paper is pretty good (sturdy, sharp, and heavyweight), thin foil (the kind you use in the kitchen) kinda sucks (the only upside is that it's shiny), and printer paper inside thin foil is great. Best of both worlds - sturdy, sharp, heavyweight, and shiny. It's sharper than the paper version.
\o/
And after folding three of them (one paper, one foil, one paper-and-foil), I've got the hang of it. Start ph34ring my l33t n1nj4 skillz. ;)

Cute animal photos (because I can):
*waddle waddle*
Who says cats eat mice?
Happy birthday Panda
That's one weird corrida!

How to make paper airplanes. (Three links.) w00t, fun! \o/
(I found the instructions for one of my favourite models again - I'd forgotten how far that thing flies. \o/ FUN!)

Updated the sidebar a bit, adding / removing / updating links. That's all, really.
I should start reading blogs daily again.

Oh, and I just noticed this: I have two versions of the same song in my winamp playlist, in two different languages ("Fidati di me" / "Fiate de mi" by Laura Pausini, in Italian and Spanish). I can recognize which version is which from the first five seconds of the track. The singer hums at the beginning, and she does it in a slightly different tempo in each version. I did this subconsciously, until just now, when I caught myself doing it and decided to check what was it that it was different and allowed me to guess the version.
I'm such a music freak. ^^;;;

Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention in all the excitement for the €900 job (WOOHOO!!!)... I met up with my old volleyball trainer this morning (er, Thursday morning, since it's Friday already... yeah, I'm staying up again). I hadn't seen her in a year or so because, because of university, I'd had to stop playing volleyball two years ago... one year ago I worked as a referee for them, but last year I couldn't do it. Anyway, she basically said that I could work with them as an "assistant trainer", either for 11-13 yr old girls or for elementary school kids, and then if I like it they'll send me on a course for trainers so I can be a trainer proper and have my own small group of girls to train. Well, w00t. \o/

I just landed a translation job... 90 pages to translate, two weeks to do it, I get paid €900.

And here I was, thinking I'd have money problems for Lucca Comics in November...

WOOHOO!!! \o/ \o/ \o/

Wow. Blunder Maximus. I'm speechless, really.

This is not real. We've seen it all before. Slow down, you're screaming. What exploded? When? I guess this means we've got ourselves a war. And look at -- Lord have mercy, not again.

Awww... (Article is in Italian. Babelfish et similaria won't help you understand, since it's a rather poetically written article. Bloody hell, I wish I could write like that. Here's a CNN article, in English, about the same thing, but it's nowhere near as well written.)

I need to tidy my room more often.

No, seriously, I need to tidy my room more often. Or at least, tidy it less superficially when I tidy it. Because if I don't do that, when I decide to tidy it properly and go deep, it's like an archeological dig.

The first layer, just below the Mundane Stuff (books and the like, stuff that gets moved around almost daily as I read, reread and move stacks in my constant book devouring) is the Study Layer. Stack upon stack of university course notes, photocopies, and books - most of which I no longer need, so it gets thrown in the garbage or, if I think it'll be useful someday, stacked on whichever of my shelves looks less full at the moment or just outside of my door to be brought downstairs, where all the Perhaps Useful Again study stuff resides. Most of it gets thrashed without regret, as you'll imagine, especially the notes and photocopies from classes I hated. But book photocopies stay: hell, I didn't spend all that time laboriously photocopying, page after page, an entire book just to throw it away.
And sometimes, upon finding something particularly interesting, I sit down and read through it, and when I look back up half an hour has elapsed - one of the reasons tidying my room usually takes me so long. Interesting Stuff is Interesting Stuff, and I can never resist the lure of Interesting Stuff, whether it's study-related or not.

The second layer is the Writing Layer. Notebooks everywhere, bits and pieces of paper where I noted story ideas, and pens. Lots of pens. Most have only a tiny bit of ink left in them, victims of my A Pen A Week syndrome. I write a lot of stuff.
I gather up all of it, and spend a couple of hours sitting on the floor sifting through it. I divide study notes (what little there is of them... there's a reason the notebooks are all in this layer, and it's that, even if my notebooks start out as Strictly For Studying, they end up having 99% of the content being story ideas and such) from story ideas, divide the ideas based on the setting (since I have several stories going at the same time), dig out my stapler from the mess that is my desk and staple together the pages that belong together, and at the end, I have a bunch of neatly tidied story ideas and several empty notebooks with more than 3/4 of the pages ripped out. I put the story ideas in a neat little pile on my nightstand (which is more like another, smaller-sized, desk than a proper nightstand) and I put the empty notebooks in a neat little pile on a corner of my desk (after shoving around stuff to make said corner free).

The third layer is the Random Stuff layer. Have I mentioned that I'm a bit of a packrat? Well, I am. I see something pretty, or shiny, or Perhaps Useful Someday, and I can't help but take it to my room and shove it somewhere. This layer is composed of lots of ribbons of all sorts (which end up neatly put away in a small box labelled "ribbons"), feathers of all sorts (some seagull feathers from the last time I was on a beach with seagulls and I found some feathers, and lots of feathers from my parents' sofa's cushions, which, when cleaned, have the habit of spitting out feathers by the dozen: all the feathers, no matter the origin, end up in a small bag labelled "feathers"), some marbles (which end up in the Big Marble Jar I have sitting in one corner of my room, to keep company to all the marbles from my childhood), some pretty pebbles I picked up the last time I was on a pebbly beach and bored out of my skull (boredom is dangerous), and miscellaneous Nice Stuff. All of it gets shoved into a box, which gets shoved into one of my wardrobes (for lack of a better place to put it).

The last layer is Stuff I Thought I'd Lost Or Forgot That I Had. This includes a bunch of Pokemon stuff (which I forgot that I had): all of it is Cute Stuff I managed to get mom to buy for me every time we went shopping, such as marbles (have I mentioned that I love marbles yet?), two sets of three stamps, a Mew figurine with wheels that moves its feet if you roll it on the ground. Also included are lots of doubles for a Magic Knight Rayearth Italian trading card set; the Sailoruranus and Sailorstarhealer keychains I bought ages ago while in Perugia and thought I'd lost somewhere; a light-up Pikachu keychain which was the first gift I ever got from somebody I met off the internet (this guy on a mailing list I was subscribed to... the guy's parents owned a toy shop, and he got a bunch of free stuff to give away, if I remember correctly); and the birthday card I got from my parents for my tenth birthday. There was also a very small Pikachu keychain I got for getting second place in a Pokemon trading card game tournament. No, I didn't spend money on the cards: my brother bought a pre-constructed deck for me because he wanted me to play with him, and I entered the tournament for a laugh. I then proceeded to kick the ass of all the kids who got their parents to buy them extra-rare cards with said pre-constructed deck. Bwahaha. (And if you wonder who beat me in the final, it was my brother, by chance... he used an attack on my last pokemon with his last pokemon, and it included flipping a coin to see if it hit or not. It hit. If it hadn't hit, I would've won.)

So. My desk and nightstand and room are finally free from the Evil Pile Of Random Stuff That Needs To Be Dug Through. What will I do now?
Well, I have to shelve the last pile of manga I got. Funny how quickly it piles up when you buy lots every month... I shelved every single manga volume that was in stacks around my room not long ago. (Have a look at the Stack From Hell, by the way. That's something like three months' worth of manga and videos, and it's more or less my height. I'm not short, either, 175cm. The stack would've been even taller, had I not already tidied some of the manga before I put it all in one big stack to force myself to tidy it in one sitting instead of sitting and rereading.) And I have to tidy my bookshelves, though that will take a while, and it's not something I'll do anytime soon if I can help it. (No, you can't see a picture of those. It's a pretty horrifying sight. Stacks, stacks everywhere, and lots of books in sight...)

The edit your weblog listing drive. I listed myself, since I wasn't listed. Advertising never hurts. ;)

Penis size calculator. Sheesh, Brits.
(Any male reader willing to calculate for himself and then tell me if the thing is accurate or not? ;)

Hello Kitty USB Hub, for all the people out there who need more Hello Kitty in their life. Have a look around, there's also a Hello Kitty computer, keyboard, mouse, etc.

...

Am I the only one who thinks this is a bit ridiculous?

The strange history of Michael Jackson's face. Brrrr. What can draw somebody to botch up their face like that? (Also have a look at an animated history.)

Think you're a driver with balls? Get some for your vehicle of choice, then. *falls off her chair laughing*

So what's it like where you live?. Interesting idea.
(Of course, there's always people who try to be funny... bleh.)

Tales of the Plush Cthulhu. *giggle*

I've bought the first volume of the Fruits Basket manga (translated in Italian), and I have to say I like it a lot. But now I want to know how the story continues and I don't want to wait two months for the next issue to come out... ^^; Can anybody point me towards a site with (complete) translations for Furuba?

Random test, because I'm mildly bored...
 

What Inuyasha Character are you?

I'm downloading Disney songs for some reason. o.o Some are nice, too. And I've always loved Disney movies for some reason (even though most of the new ones are crap). Trip back to my childhood, yay. \o/

Hm. So Winamp 3 is out. And from the looks of it (and for what I've heard), it's Monster Bloat. I'd download it and test for myself, but I'm rather happy with Winamp 2 on this computer and on my laptop, thank you, and if I tried on my brother's computer he'd doubtlessly throttle me. :p

Psychic website... not. It's rather obvious how it works, actually. At least to me. ^^v

^^;;; Why am I not surprised? (Link off Ragabash-san)

Sometimes it comes in handy that I've been a regular at the comic store in my city ever since it opened (it'll be 8 years in December, if I remember correctly), and that I even worked there for a bit (as a "security guard", checking that people didn't steal anything on busy Saturday afternoons). For instance, when I go there, buy a lot of manga, and then I don't have enough money to pay for it all. The stack of manga I came home with today is worth around 50 euro, I only had 30. I'll pay the remaining 20 next time I'm at the shop and have enough money. \o/ Luca, the owner, knows I'm a regular and I'm not about to run away and leave the debt unpaid.

Okay. So my mom cut her finger this evening trying to pry a coconut out of its shell with a knife. (Something I'd been attempting to do, but gave up on saying, "I can't do this. I'm stopping before I cut one of my fingers off or something". Two minutes later, mom goes "ow". Guess I jinxed her or something. Hehe.) So we go to the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet, to discover two things: one, we're short on disinfectant, and two, we have a lot of bandaids. I mean a lot of bandaids. You'd probably find less kinds of bandaids in any supermarket. Apparently, mom stocked up on bandaids twice after we'd ran out of them the last time, forgetting that she'd already bought them and so buying them again. So we have all kinds of bandaids. We have regular bandaids, we have waterproof bandaids (which appear to be afraid of water, as every time I use one of those and then take a shower they get right off, while regular bandaids hold just fine), square bandaids, round bandaids, large bandaids, medium-sized bandaids, tiny bandaids, oval bandaids, eight-shaped bandaids for fingers (or you could consider them infinite-shaped, since after all an infinite symbol is just an eight that got tired and decided to take a nap... hey, that would be a good slogan, actually... "infinite protection for your fingers!"... okay, okay, it wouldn't be a good slogan, it would just give me a chance to be witty by making the aforementioned "tired 8" comment). We even have those newfangled bandaids for blisters. We have small boxes, single-type boxes, all-in-one boxes, and the Big Box, which promises "all kinds of bandaids" but now just hosts the really small ones, the ones our family never uses (and I doubt anybody else ever uses, because let's face it, those bandaids are so small that they would cover only really really small wounds, and those aren't wounds, they're scratches, what kind of wimp would put a bandaid over a scratch?). We have enough bandaids to last us a year or even more, considering how rarely we get hurt so seriously that we need a bandaid. Last time I used a bandaid was last month, because I had a kitten scratch on my foot and my sandal strap kept rubbing there and preventing healing so I had to protect it somehow (otherwise I wouldn't have used a bandaid on there). Before that, I honestly can't remember. I can't remember the last time my brother or either of my parents needed a bandaid either, except for today.
Oh well. Now we just have to remember to buy disinfectant next time we go to the supermarket. (And hopefully mom won't buy it twice.)
...anyone need a bandaid?

(Make your own barcode with the barcode generator.)

Icchan, this is for you: airport security staff confiscates a two-inch plastic gun from a GI Joe doll. (I suppose they'd let through combs and brushes, though?)

Grandma Knapp's '37 road trip. Rather interesting, even for a non-American like me.

*points at sidebar* Heh. I was bored, so why not... if you started your blog because of mine (though I really doubt anybody did ^^) sign up, so my blog won't be all lonely... ;)
(I'd list my parent blog, but it died a long time ago. ¬¬)

Hrhm. Been playing Planescape Torment rather a lot... I like it. I absolutely despise my previous incarnations XO Damn but they were bastards. XO
As for the NPCs (the ones I've already met, anyway), Dak'kon makes me feel uneasy and gets on my nerves, I like Annah a lot, Fall-From-Grace is very nice, Ignus really freaks me out, and Morte's a riot. Though (after going through the memory related to him, how I found him and stuff)... I feel sorry for the poor guy. (Guy, skull, whatever.) I feel really sorry for him. :|

Meh. This is to say, I guess, go play Planescape Torment if you haven't already. It's bloody good, one of the few games which has made me really feel for the characters. Beats the hell out of any other RPG I've played, including Baldur's Gate II. Of course you have to be willing to follow a plot and read through a lot of conversations... but it's really bloody good. It's almost like reading a book, and not playing a game.

Ahh, being a manga fan is so difficult when you buy lots of manga but neglect to place them on my shelves for four months. It took me all morning to demolish the Stack From Hell (photo fortcoming) and tidy them all decently. x.x

Okay, here's the holiday photos. This will be half-narration and half-photos, just because I feel like it. Photos with random commentary, and commentary with random photos. *shrug*

Starting from the Friday before we left, because there's a couple of "ph34r teh cuteness" photos I have to show you... we went to take our kittens to one of my cousins' place, because they're still too small to sleep outside alone and no neighbours could take care of them. It was the place we got them from in the first place, so no risks they ran away. While there, we were told that another of my cousin's cats (lots of cats there) had just had kittens two days earlier. Therefore, I present to you two-day-old kittens with their mom and without their mom. You may go "aww" now. ;)

The next day, Saturday, we left home really early (5am, after waking up at 4am). Keep in mind that my parents and brother were in bed by 10pm or so at the latest, and I got to sleep well after midnight. Guess who was the less sleepy person at the end of the day? *raises hand and grins* It all has to do with my ability to sleep in just about every situation, provided that I have a semi-confortable place to sit. Therefore, I slept through most of the car trip (until 10am or so), while my parents were keeping themselves awake with coffee and the smell of coffee was keeping my brother awake (sigh. 16 and already a coffee addict. where's the world going?).

Anyway. We got to Elba earlier than we were supposed to, because there was no traffic at all (\o/) so we got to the port earlier than we'd expected (\o/) so we were able to take an earlier ferryboat.

We even had time to visit an ancient Etruscan necropolis before taking the ferryboat. So, you can have a look at the outside of an Etruscan tomb, the inside of said tomb (looking outwards), the inside of another (different) tomb, and the entrance corridor to said different tomb (if it looks small, it's because it was small - you had to crawl to get through).
One curiosity: each tomb, when it was found, was buried under literally tons of Etruscan "industrial refuse", bits and pieces of iron that the Etruscans weren't able to melt. You can find them all over the Etruscan necropolis and all over Elba. (Maybe all ancient people should've done that. Instant souvenirs, and no need to steal stones from old buildings and the like!)
Elba has been an iron mining place for ages, too. There's even a place called "Punta Calamita" (Magnet Point) because of all the iron that could be found there. (The photo's an old mining complex you can see from the sea.)

Elba as a whole is rather beautiful. The place we were staying at was really beautiful (here's two shots of the place, an old well and an arch with flowers)... we had the beach practically on our doorstep, and we did basically nothing but stay on the beach. (Who knew that being lazy and doing absolutely nothing all day could be so relaxing? Heh.) Oh, and we had cats to cuddle, too. You see, there were two cats there (one female, one male) who, not being stupid, decided that cuddling up to tourists and getting hugged and fed by them was not a bad way to make a living. ;)

So... this was the horizon of our holiday. ;)
We went swimming and stuff too, long walks on the beach, took photos, picked up pretty pebbles and those rounded glass fragments you can find on beaches. In the evenings, we went to the pizza place next to the seaside, where there was "entertainment" (if you call loud music entertainment). A couple evenings there was "live music" - three guys singing on top of MIDIs and pretending to play their instruments. They weren't bad singers though. And of course my mom went and convinced them to let me sing a few songs... ¬¬ notably, "My heart will go on" by Celine Dion. Which I hadn't heard in years, let alone ever sung... but I'm told I did decently. Meh.

But anyway...

Obligatory Photos Of The Sea, Sky And Assorted Miscellaneous Things:
(for lack of better definitions) A wave, the sea, the afternoon sun reflecting on the sea, the sea and sky from the ferryboat, sunlight reflecting on the water, sea water, the sea, with a few boats and sunlight reflecting on it, a seagull in flight, blue sea water, the water at sunset, sunset, sunset again, sunlight reflecting on water (slightly blurred... not my fault, the boat I was on kept moving!), some clouds, and the sun behind some clouds.

Oh, and here's the full list of the results for my exams this year at uni:
(all marks are out of 30)

Sponsorship of Cultural Events (don't ask) - 25
Media and Its Transformation - 28
English II - 29
Spanish II - 26 (considering I still can't seem to manage to string together a correct sentence, it's fairly decent, isn't it?)
Writing for Journalism (course from hell I) - 28
History of Journalism (course from hell II) - 30 (w00t w00t)
Principles of Marketing (ick ick ick - this is the exam I studied very little for, incidentally) - 25
Applied Information Technology - 30 (heh heh... as if this is any surprise)
"Creative Psychology" (not really Creative Psychology by any stretch of the imagination) - 30 (wtf. This is the subject I did the BSsay for, if you remember me whining about it... I never expected getting so high a mark on it. o.O Oh well. I'm not complaining.)
Project Year II - 30 (w00t w00t w00t)
Editing & Publishing - 29

For an average of 28.33. That shut up my parents' whining that I should study more. :p

I'm back. Expect an account of the holiday, with photos and the like, sometime tomorrow. (If I don't get lazy, that is.)