Living Below Sea Level

Partly blue sky, partly black, partly sunny, partly hail storm, partly heavy rain. Since this morning the sea level at the dam has risen three metres. (Higher than ever before.) Today in pet stores some animals have died. At first they thought it was gas leak, but now they know it was due to stress.

I wonder why I can't see even birds in the sky.

Just in case I'm at the moment 1.8 metres below the sea level.

I'll post an update a day after tomorrow...

Found news in English, too.

Traditional Finnish Pasta

Really traditional. - From 50's I think. Around the time when pasta came to Finland. If you've looked at any of my recipes, you might notice they are a bit vague. It's because I don't use a clock, nor measurement tools in kitchen. I measure with feeling, and the clock doesn't know when the food is ready. So bear with me...

Makaroonilaatikko - Macaroni-box

2 onions
3 eggs
A lot of garlic
About 0,5l of macaroni pasta (the 1/3 of a circle type tube thing)
About 0,6 - 0,7l milk
About 500g minced beef
Cheese
Paprika powder / chili powder (you decide)
White pepper

Set the oven at about 200°C. Take an oven-tray about 20cm x 30cm x 7cm in size. (This is just an estimate, I have no measurement tools, remember?) Boil the macaroni. Chop the onions. Chop the garlic. Fry the beef. Add those spices to the meat. A lot of both. Fry the onions.

Yep, separately if you bought your meat from a shop. It contains so much water you need to pour that away, so do that before adding spices. If you are lucky enough to live next to a butcher, then you can add the spices immediately and fry the onions at the same time. In this case, put the onions first to the pan and add meat on top.

Mix the meat, macaroni, onions and garlic together in the tray. I guess a tray to make meatloaf or a cake is quite ok size. Add some more white pepper and paprika powder. Mix some more.

Take about 0,6 - 0,7 litres of milk, add 3 (or 4) eggs in the mix and stir with a fork. Pour the stuff on top of the macaroni-meat-mix, so it just barely don't cover it completely. Add cheese on top.

Put in the oven for like ... the time you can listen to Notkea Rotta: Kontula - Koh Phangan All Night Long album completely. How long is that? 45 minutes? About. Well... as long as you see the milk has been sucked from the sides, if you use glass tray. (I like glass trays, you see when the food is ready.)

First School Shooting In Finland

There was an American-style school shooting in Finland today. (I guess we can call it Seven Eleven shootings from now on.) This is the first (and hopefully last) of its kind. (I think there was an incident couple of decades ago when someone shot couple of bullies in one school, but that wasn't random madness.) I guess one of the safest countries in the world is no longer that safe. Pekka-Eric Auvinen took his Charlene (the same idea as in the movie Full Metal Jacket) a Sig Sauer .22 Mosquito pistol (same model than in Columbine) to school.

This guy had some issues. It's weird his parents didn't notice it. He was writing about this massacre weeks in advance on forums, his blog, his Youtube account etc. Unfortunately only preparing a crime is not illegal in Finland, excluding preparations for terrorist attack or illegal surveillance. In this modern world, where mothers carrying their babies and breast-milk bottles are suspected terrorist, how come planning a mass-murder in school can't be counted as an act of terrorism? Especially when he said "Attack Type: Mass murder, political terrorism (altough I choosed the school as target, my motives for the attack are political and much much deeper and therefore I don’t want this to be called only as “school shooting”)." - ...So why they couldn't stop him in advance?

All his .doc files are titled: "Hate, I'm so full of it, and I love it." Sick puppy. OK, I understand that every teenager is frustrated.

When you are a teenager you are always right, and you will never be so right in your life. (My dad used to say that to me when I was a teenager, and I didn't really understand it then...) Every teenager goes through a period of healthy angstic misantrophy, but there's a fine line between that and a sic fixation on murder and death.

This guy was extremely fixated on violence, especially mass- and serial killers. He especially endorsed Columbine shooting, but other school shootings as well. "A child is healthy when he's playing, sick when he can't stop." His teachers have been saying in the media that he was "above the average student", "extremely bright" but "had interest in far-right and far-left movements". Far-left and far-right? What does this mean? He liked violence in general?

His rantings over the internet also express his hatred towards democracy and totalitarian regimes, his love for freedom and dreams of ruling class who decide over the "weak" majority of people is, to me, an indication that he actually needed to think his opinions and world view much more.

Majority of his writings were self-contradicting and full of repetition. Fancy words put together to sound intelligent. Train of thoughts if you will.

I read political texts/writings/books, and follow news around the world, I understand some of the reasons he explains why he was bitter. But violence on grass-root level is never a solution. It won't make a difference. Unfortunately government-level violence has been, is and will be a solution to many problems. He boasted about his self-awareness. Yet he didn't stop to think what this will do. If any changes are done, they don't change the system. Well, system, kinda yes. School system if any. And how we go to school. Current administration in the world doesn't believe in educating and guiding people. Instead they make rules, laws and force people to behave. The only difference what I can think of now is the school is going to be much more tough on other pupils in Finnish schools. This kind of "political terrorist attack" was only counter-productive for what he claimed to believe in.

He tried to shoot himself in the head at the end. Should've started from that. I believe if someone doesn't like this world, he or she has all the rights in the world to end it. I am not against suicide. If you don't want to be here, I think it's wrong if we force you to be here. Yet, the only time I accept killing another person is if the person is posing an immediate threat to your life and cannot be stopped otherwise. Who made him the "Natural Selector"? If you're sick of the society, move to Lapland and start herding reindeer. There are other options. "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Yep, that's where we live. Democracy. Don't like it? Change the system from within the system. Can't? Move away from the country/society you don't like. Can't be bothered to? Then stop complaining and bite the bullet! (Figuratively speaking.)

Other thing I noticed in his Youtube videos and his writings was his hatred towards anti-depressants. Perhaps he suffered from some sort of mental disorder he had to use pills for? In some cases wrong medication only makes things worse. "When nothing matters, and nothing feels like anything." In Finland we don't try to prevent nor cure burn-outs or manic-depressive behaviour. Instead we like to give medicine to suppress the symptoms. Maybe he was suffering from mental illness? (Well, d'uh, but as in mental illness like borderline disorder or manic-depressive...)

Today is also the day when Russia celebrates the 90th anniversary of the October Revolution.

Scary thing was his love/hate list. I feel kinda the same way in most parts. I have similar interests... Bad humour is the best humour, etc. Also, his list of favourite books is almost identical to mine... Should I be scared of myself now? (Don't worry, I don't believe in violence. I won't be shooting you.)

I wonder how his blues-guitarist dad, and the rest of the family* take this... Although correcting a lost child should be firstly done by the parents, I still hope they have the strength to get over this.

And I have to give thanks and praises to the police who acted quite quickly with the Karhu-team (Bear-team, equivalent of S.W.A.T.) and around 100 police officers in total. For the medical staff working there. The local hospital had within an hour from the information of the fist gun blast 18 operation rooms ready and a battalion of ambulances at the school, and for the rapid evacuation of the neighbourhood.

More in the net: BBC LiveLeak
I won't be posting his dads web page nor his own writings due to respect for his parents. But they're not difficult to find if you really want to.

Addition @ 21:51 CET: The 18-year old shooter died in the hospital. According to Helsingin Sanomat he died in the hospital 22:14 CET+1, that's half an hour ago. The casualties are 5 boys, 2 girls and the Principal of the School.

* @ 8/11 - Too much info edited out as irrelevant.

Metric Time

I noticed someone else have had the same idea!

Metric Time!

I'd support that. And this seems better than our idea when I was a teenager. Our idea was 100 hours in one day, 100 minutes in one hour, and 100 seconds in one minute. The rest normally, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

This seems much better.

10 days a week. This would make a year 36,5 weeks long. Months can be re-divided also to 10 (36,5 days per month), and those occultists who want to keep the Zodiac thing, can still use the old astrology charts if they want. Earth-month and Zodiac-month separately, if you need to do some spells according to the old astrology charts.

Should we update to metric time, we could also remove the old British relic, daylight savings time. If more daylight is required psychologically for people, then we can just change the starting hour of work during winters. I'd remove the entire daylight-based opening times anyways. People move to cities from countryside. Cities are full. Fine. We can't all be out at the same time. I've been working graveyard shifts and have had studying and work at the same time... My time off might've been from 2am to 6am, then 6 hours sleep and to evening shift at work, which would've been my morning. In the city with all the streetlights, who needs defined shop opening times? If everyone wants to live in a city, wouldn't be more useful to disband the old day vs night thinking and use the whole day. 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep for everyone and 8 hours of free time*. (* - With the current time standard.) The "daytime" just depends when you work and when you have your sleeping time. This would generate more jobs for people and would ease up rush-hour. Large cities should do this.

Pizza Opera Special

My housemates are gone for the rest of the evening. One working, other one to a birthday party. I've been left home alone. (Yeah, museum night tonight, but it's more of a bar night, than museum anything... I'll pass.)

Tomorrow, when everyone's here I'll be doing pork-medallions, green paprika - white wine - cream sauce, steamed vegetables with spices & herbs and potato-apple-rösti. Sorry, can't write the recipe yet, since I haven't done that yet so not sure of how to make it at this moment.

But for tonight's food.

What you need:
4 garlic cloves (minimum)
Black olives
Black pepper (preferably freshly ground)
Cheese
Flour
Olive oil
Paprika salami
Pinch of sugar
Shrimps
Tomato sauce
Tuna fish
Yeast

About ½kg flour and ½dl olive oil in a bowl. A thumb-size lump of yeast in a glass, a t-spoon of sugar and hand-warm water. Mix. Add the yeast-water to the bowl and mix with a hand. Add sum herbs if you like and crush couple of garlic cloves in the mix. Add flour and/or water to make it tight dough. Use a bottle or something to make it flat. Slightly bigger than the oven-tray. Oven to 50°C and the tray in.

Tomato sauce, a lot of garlic, spices of your choice, black pepper - cut garlic in small pieces, mix all together. Take the oven-tray out the oven and pour the tomato sauce-mix on top. Spread with a spoon. Cheese on top, a thick layer. Slice the salami on top. Add a lot of tuna, shrimps and black olives. Cover with a thin layer of cheese.

Oven, about 200°C for ... until the pizza looks ready. The amount of toppings... you decide. Your pizza.

Wait a second?! I forgot chili! Argh! And the pizza in already in the oven! Noooooooo!

Is This A Serious News Article?

I saw this article in Reuters. If this would be in some semi-funny evening magazine, I wouldn't be bothered to mention, but this news is provided by Reuters! Is this for real? It's not 1st of April now, is it? I really can't make up my mind whether this is tongue-in-cheek article or a serious article...

Here's the article, just in case:

Marx's erupting skin may have influenced writings

LONDON (Reuters) - Karl Marx, who complained of excruciating boils, actually suffered from a chronic skin disease with known psychological effects that may well have influenced his writings, a British expert said on Tuesday.

Sam Shuster, professor of dermatology at the University of East Anglia, believes the revolutionary thinker had hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) in which the apocrine sweat glands -- found mainly in the armpits and groin -- become blocked and inflamed.

"In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem," said Shuster, who published his findings in the British Journal of Dermatology.

"This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing."

While HS is linked to boil-like lumps, the painful condition also causes more widespread infection, swelling, skin thickening and scarring.

It could also explain a number of Marx's other complaints, not previously linked, such as joint pain and a painful eye condition which often stopped him working.

Shuster based his diagnosis on an analysis of Marx's extensive correspondence, in which he wrote to friends about his health and described his skin lesions as "curs" and "swine".

"The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day," Marx told Friedrich Engels in a letter from 1867.

Marx, who died in 1883, was one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century and his radical writings formed the basis of modern communism.

© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.

(Link to the original article.)

What a lame 100th blog post... To celebrate the 100th posting, I made a propaganda poster:

Another Two Images In One

A friend of mine wanted me to make that kind of double-image of him too. Here it is:

An Advertisement Idea Pt.2

I have another advertisement idea. Yesterday I posted that image that looks different, depending on your viewing distance. This has some commercial potential.

How about an ad like this:
(Click the images to enlarge them.)
To emphasize what it would look like, I took the illusion part off. So when you are far away, it would look like this:
But as you get closer, the product and the logo kinda blurs away and another image appears:
This would be great on highways, bus stops and such. Where ever people are going towards, not only passing by sideways, but going towards the ad.

The image of the girl is some random image somewhere I got with Google image search. If you own the copyright, or are that girl in the picture, and want me to remove the image, please don't hesitate to contact me. This is just a rough draft, to get the idea through, so for me it really doesn't matter.

Also, if you are in advertisement company, and like the idea, and perhaps even want to use it, please do contact me.

Two Images In One

I saw an image that looks like one thing when you're close and other thing when you're further away. I planned to do one meself.

This is my first try on this one, but it still does the trick somehow. Have to better this technique more. How I did it:

What we need:
2 Images. Close-up larger than 1000px, Far away a bit smaller.
1 Photoshop
1 New Image that is something like 1000-1200px in size.
1 End result image, 130px wide and 220 high, 72dpi. (Screen)

How:
1. Take two images that are similar, put them on their own layers. The one you want to be seen when you're close should be on top, higher resolution / quality and sharper.
2. Desaturate them both. - Or if you want color images, then do desired color corrections, brightness, etc.
3. Take the top layer and align the major parts of it with the bottom one. Or vice versa. Adjust scaling when necessary.
4. For bottom layer, we only run Filter/Blur/Gaussian... on something like 10. A lot of it. That's about it for this layer.
5. Top layer. First, run Filter/Sharpen/Sharpen Edges and Filter/Sharpen/Sharpen More one or two times. (Not really necessary.)
6. We need to highlight the edges of the image. Do Filter/Other/High-Pass. Adjust so you see sharp edges, but still quite low contrast.
7. Just a tiny bit of Filter/Artistic/Poster Edges filter. Lowest settings on thickness and intensity. Posterization quite high.
8. Select all, copy, deselect all. (CTRL and then A, C, D.)
9. Add a mask to the layer, paste the clipboard to the mask, invert. If there's parts that stick out when you Zoom out from the image and look closer and further away, then fix it with brush on the mask. Like in the image I made, there's the edges of the hat in the close-up image that made the image you see when you're further away look like a turban. So I wanted to emphasize the forehead and the cut in the hair. I went to the mask, took a soft brush, opacity something like 20%. Painted on the edges of the hat, and the shape of the hairline of the blurred image on the backround and the part where background image's hair makes that V shape curve on top. Brushing them slightly darker made the background image to shine up a bit more.
10. Zoom the image so it's like about something in the range of... 200px? The smaller it is, less far you need to go to see the other image. So not bigger than about 200-300 if you plan to see it while standing in the same room. And Zoom in to see the image you want to be seen when you're close. Alternate between Zoom in and Zoom out, saves a lot of walking.

Balance between steps 9 and 10 until it's ready.

11. Last part. Resize the image to something like 100-200 wide and 200-300 high (portrait) or vice versa if landscape.

This is what I just figured out after looking at those images today... well, it's 00:57 at the moment, so yesterday... Anyways, so if some photoshop pro guru has any tutorials for this, I'd appreciate. Interesting stuff. Any idea what to call these images?

Amsterdam Police Recruit Ad

I saw this ad in the newspaper today:
It's a recruitment ad of the Amsterdam-Amstelland police forces. A question arose. Why this image on it? What do they want to communicate with this image?

Revealing Anonymity

I don't get the whole point of finding out who some random anonymous blogger is. OK, what if we find out one blogger is called Desmond? Does this validate whatever he says more that if his name would be Charles? And after someone has searched the whole net and driven to the person's house to take pictures and finally gets his reward by revealing Charles' or Desmond's identity, then what? What did you gain? What are you going to do with that information?

Dalai Lama was in USA recently. Does it matter if one point is made by either George or Dalai, if you agree with the point? Or do you need to have a person behind your opinions? Is this to say, that people rather agree with people they like, rather than make their own opinions and valuate other opinions based on their own values and morals?

For example, I do not agree with Hitler's idea of the world. (Oh no! Godwin! Godwin! I lost!) But I do agree with his idea of social security. I do agree with the maternity leave. I do agree with highways instead of horse carriage paths when there's lots of traffic. (Although the amount of cars we have now is not so good. Especially if China starts to promote "2 cars in every household" theme...) But see, even Hitler did things I agree with. And I don't like that person. Not one bit. I agree with those points, not with the person. I'm that strong of a person, I can do that. Easily. Can you? So for me it doesn't matter who invented social security or maternity leave, I think those are good ideas.

I am able to process information and draw my own conclusions. I do not need an authoritative figure to tell me how to think. Therefore I can take any idea, any opinion, and decide whether I like it or not regardless of the inventor of that particular idea. It doesn't matter whether the inventor lives in Ohio, USA or Goa, India. It's the message that matters. Even if I know the location and identity of someone who's blogging, it doesn't matter for me unless I know the person in real life or plan to meet with this person. Being anonymous is a sign of "no, I don't want to know you in real life" so I leave those people alone. Yes, they are my dancing monkeys while writing the blog, but their private life is private.

But if you still get some satisfaction of finding out people's identities, don't worry. Just start to promote subcutaneous RFIDs and TCPA. If we manage to get both mandatory, you don't need to go through all this hustle just to find out Alfred Russel's real name.

Of course, exclusion. If someone tells me that something is a fact, I want to check it. If someone writes an opinion, I don't need to know the authority behind, but if someone writes "the speed of light can be exceeded" I want to see some proof and I want to know who is this guy and what makes him think this is possible. If someone writes "I think the speed of light is stupid", I don't need to know who that person is. It's an opinion. I can process this information regardless who this person is. It's not a hard fact we need to accept so I can take it as an opinion, instead of a study of facts.

Yet, the biggest questions remain: Why and so what?

Why would you find out who is this man of mystery?
What does this give you?
What difference does it make if you know the identity of someone?
Why do you need to know someones identity to agree/disagree with any given idea?
Can you agree with an idea if you don't like the person who came up with the idea?

Holiday Pictures For Me Mum And Dad

I was recently in Germany for a week visiting an old friend. Used to share a house in another country with him.

German forests are beautiful, but one very interesting this is the witch-circles. Mushrooms that grow in circles.


A strong stream.


We found a psychedelic looking treestump.


...had to take a posing picture too. What a loser!


We were actually looking for Steinpilz (Herkkutatti, Porcini, Boletus edulis) mushrooms. And found them!


All images are his copyright, but he wishes to stay anonymous.

I'm Honoured By A VA Fansite

As I've mentioned earlier, I read Violent Acres. Sometimes I write to Violentacrestalk.com (which includes the word stalk, by the way) and just noticed, they have honoured me with a quote of mine.

Thank you, the admin of Violentacrestalk.

A T-Shirt Idea

A T-Shirt idea. Just need to find a print shop and print it for meself.

(Hope you get it.)

More info, added 12th of October:

Close up of the image to see the colors:

(Click on the image for larger view.)



Incredients:
Photoshop
Illustrator
Some small clipart of couple dancing tango (livetraced).
Some small clipart of a palm tree (livetraced).
The font is a free Partridge with a bit of extra italics.

Objects done in Illustrator and brought to Photoshop for composition. Objects are Smart Objects, so they will retain their vector properties for scaling. At the moment the orig. image is A4 landscape size with 300dpi, but can be scaled to any size. (Ah, the beauty of vectors.) I know I could've done it solely in Illustrator - but I like Photoshop.

Watchmen The Movie

Among other things I enjoy comic books and comic-book-to-movie conversions even if those are comic-books I don't read meself. But there's so many movies coming, especially after Spider-Man & X-Men, when all the Marvel comics are being filmed. But I found a comic-book-to-be-a-movie worth advertising!

Watchmen

One of the best super-hero comics I've read. (And I normally prefer Marvel over DC...)

But my comic book taste is more towards European comics, Belgium of course, but others as well, like Italian, and Eastern-European - say, like Enki Bilal. (Who's movie Immortal was quite a disappointment.)