A Bit of ASCII Art… and Before Sunrise

Do you know those pictures who are made simply of letters, numbers, or any other keyboard characters? Yep, like the ones you see in program cracks.

It is called ASCII art.
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that consists of pictures pieced together from printable characters; or basically, a text based art.
I just found out about it the other day while browsing for letters.

This is another example of ASCII art. The Yin Yang on the right is actually made of the words ‘yin yang’. You can zoom in to see it.

bX-q0tcxb OR gadget broken

My layout is broken.
I can't add any gadgets.
This really blows.
I'm stuck with this template for a while.
Hope everything gets back to normal soon.

UPDATE
There.
Everything's pretty much back to normal now.
I guess I'll keep this ever-wide template after all.

Jens Lekman's Your Arms Around Me

Jens Lekman is a Swedish indie musician currently residing in Australia. His sound uses a lot of samples, but I find them comforting. Especially the odd lyrics.



This is a song from his second album. It is also used in the movie Whip It.
He is known to change his lyrics every time he sings live, so I use the lyrics taken straightly from the album.

Who the Hell Is Clara Adelin Supit?

About a week ago, Dewi Sartika or Clara Adelin Supit (23), a student in Jakarta, reported to the police about her allegedly nude pictures that spread on the web.

She said the pictures were made at her friend's request.

Misly, the friend, said she needed them to cure her ex-boyfriend who was under a hex.

Dewi reluctantly agreed after making it clear to Misly that she wanted the pictures to be well-kept.

So she was surprised to finally find them on Facebook.

The police have questioned Misly, who accused her ex-boyfriend as the one who put them online.

Jesika Dhanies/© 2006 Richard Kern

The paragraphs above pretty much sum out the popular news filling out most headlines on the net.

It seemed pretty simple, right?

Well, in the next days, twists have come to make the matter worse.

Pageblug, the Deathly Plague

Pageblug is a Javanese term meaning 'deathly plague'.
I use the word 'deathly' instead of 'deadly' because the plague isn't just deadly (capable of producing death), it is deathly (suggestive of death, deaths are certain).
The plague itself means a lot more than a widespread disease, it means affliction.

In 1972, Pageblug descended upon three adjacent areas in Yogyakarta. The areas, Patangpuluhan, Sindurjan, and Bugisan, had a series of numerous deaths. For 6 months, death occurred once a week. The cause varied. Some died of old age, some died of illness, and some died for no apparent reason at all.

The Early Years of Gay, Queer, and Faggot

Just everybody knows what the words gay, queer, and faggot mean these days.

Well, in the early years of their origin, they had a wholly different meaning.
Gay actually meant happily excited; queer simply meant odd, or eccentric; and faggot meant a bundle of sticks, a knitting technique, or a kind of meatball.
Sometimes they're still used like that in literature, but hardly.

It's interesting how paragraphs like these would be seen nowadays.

The lady stopped faggoting her piece of cloth and offered him some faggots.
"I apologize for the food," she said. "My husband is a hunter. This is the only thing I can offer."
Flambeau kindly refused. "What do you do anyway?" he asked.
She looked at him and said with a warm smile, "I gather faggots in the woods and sell them."
She then fell into silence as she continued knitting.
Flambeau watched her work closely. It wasn't done yet, but it had already shown its beauty. He found himself amazed. Everything in his sight was so queer, that he became gay.

A Bit About Anarchism

Symbol of Anarchy

Every time I heard about anarchy or anarchism, the first picture that came to mind was people throwing rocks to the police in some kind of riot. In my ignorance, anarchy and anarchism were something of a retarded-violent-childish mind. So when I read somewhere that the character V from the novel ‘V for Vendetta’ was actually an anarchist, rather than a romantic freedom fighter, it intrigued me. The character was described as educated and civilized. What an educated-civilized person would have to do with anarchy?

I finally decided to look it up (sadly, in Wikipedia for the time), and this is a bit of what I came up.