IKEA stainless steel scissors part 2

I just had to laugh my ass off after I've seen a search result that had a link to my article about IKEA stainless steel scissors on the top! Funny what a little bit of search engine optimization can do sometimes :)

And you know what's so funny about it? If you make a link from your website to this article about the IKEA scissors, you make it rank even better. Your link becomes a vote of some sorts.

Results on Google.com:


Results on Google.nl:

Graffiti or not?

I keep a close eye on the StumbleUpon blog of Ricardo, a friend of mine. A just had to laugh about this picture. It looks like graffiti, right. Well, it isn't. At least not in the traditional way. He's cleaning! Apparently the police don't know if it's a crime or not.

IKEA stainless steel scissors (yeah, right!)

I think these scissors are barely a month in my possession...

I'm on a galactic conquest (multiple times)

With all the large 3d-games out there, you forget it's all in how the game is set up, not always how it looks like. Take the game Galcon (short for Galactic Conquest) for example. The graphics are simple, even the whole game concept is simple. But that's perfect for me. I don't have much time, so i can dive into a multi-player game quickly without having the commitment to be online for at least an hour. Perfect.

Screenshot of Galcon:

Blog redesign

The blog is undergoing a redesign. As of now it's still unfinished but you should already get an idea of how the blog is going to look like.

Anime weekend

Well, I'm back from a whole weekend watching anime (=Japanese animation) in Almelo. I should say up front that I'm not an anime expert. I mostly tag along with a friend of mine who is much more knowledgeable in that genre.

Anyways: it was fun. Not in the least because of all the cosplayers (costumed player); visitors that dress themselves as an anime characters. You can see some cosplayers if you follow the link at the bottom of this post.

The best anime series I have seen was Dennou Coil. A summary from Wikipedia:

Dennou Coil is a Japanese animation science fiction series depicting a near future where augmented reality (AR) technology has just begun to enter the mainstream. AR is combining the real, physical world with the digital world. In the series this is combined with special glasses. The series takes place in the fictional city of Daikoku, a hotbed of AR development with an emerging city-wide virtual infrastructure. It follows a group of children as they use AR visors to unravel the mysteries of the half real, half Internet city, using a variety of illegal software tools, techniques, and virtual pets to manipulate the digital landscape.

Example of Dennou Coil on Youtube

It show some interesting UI (user interface) stuff like virtual displays emerging out of thin air or pet dogs with status bars.

Another one was Lucky Star, although that was particularly hard to comprehend because of the speedy conversations. A summary from Anime News Network:

Portrays the lives of several school girls attending a Japanese high school with a very loose humor tone. The main heroine is Konata Izumi, an athletic and intelligent girl who, despite these attributes, is not in a sports club, and her grades remain low. Her laziness at school is due to her love for anime and video games, and she is not interested in much else.

I had much fun when they discussed eating techniques in Lucky Star. Well, the whole audience in fact :-)

And finally: the pictures I took on Animecon 2008.

Three cheers for the Intermediair

Yes, the good things in life are for free. Like the magazine Intermediair. It is free because it solely lives on advertisement space with vacancies for higher educated people. And although it's free it still has quality. The journalists over there have something I like: they don't let themselves get carried away by the "fast news". And by "fast news", I mean news that isn't interpreted, but only reported. I associate that with copy-paste articles from news agencies, hypes and interviews with "the man on the street".

Take for example the Tibet-issue that's in the news lately. You could call it a hype, but that's not the right word for it, because Tibet deserves to be in the picture. The only thing that bothers me is the good-bad, white-black, German-allies kind of reporting. The Intermediair didn't spend much words on it, but it pointed to some not that known facts:

- Tibet was between 1720 and 1911 an autonomous region of China. The Dalai Lama was relatively free in his decisions, but every Dalai Lama had to be approved by the Chinese government
- After the fall of the last Chinese emperor, Tibet one-sidedly declared itself independent.
- The Dalai Lama ruled as a god slash king. Most Tibetans were more or less owned by one of the many monasteries in the country.

Bet you didn't hear that in the media, right? Does it shed at least a bit of a different light on the Tibetan issue? With that being said: I still think the Tibetans should like any group of people have the right of autonomy. But please, don't make the Dalai Lama a saint or the Chinese devils. Life is more sophisticated than that.

By the way: you do know that concentration camps aren't a German invention, but British, right?