Sin City Comic vs Movie

The Sin City movie will be out soon. If you are wondering how close it is to the noir comic that is based on, check out the comparison here. Quite impresive, I would say.

So it goes

I just finished reading the short anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut. Writing an anti-war book, it says, is like writing an anti-glacier book. You just can't stop them.
The main character travels back and forth in time, to WW2, to the present, to the past, to his end, everywhere. What? Well, it does make sense. After all, everyone can travel in time, the Tralfamadorians taught him.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes'.

Many compare this book to Catch-22. Although both books are about WW2, and are on the funny side, their spirit is very different. Where Catch-22 is about the madness of war, Slaughterhouse-Five is about the madness of giving meaning to war memories.
The prose is musical and easy. If you want a funny, light read, about a complex subject, like the Dresden fire-bombing during WW2, by a brilliant, unique author, check it out. It is an excelent study on the mind of a war veteran. In a scale of terrible monsters of land and air, this book beats Godzilla, Mothra and King Kong all together.

You have bad taste in music

Thanks to one of my friends for suggesting the site YHBTIM. In it there are videos of a guy pointing out to fans of popular music that they have bad taste in music. My favorite video is the one where he makes the Linkin Park fans start chanting "Linkin Park is a Roller Coaster", and then points out how Roller Coasters look dangerous but are perfectly safe.

y&j: character creation basics: part 1

Character Creation Basics

There are several basic steps to follow when creating a 1st level character. To start you will need a photocopy of the character sheet, pencil, one six sided dice and plenty knowledge of 16th century Caribbean.

0. CHECK WITH YOUR YUCAYEQUE MASTER
Your Yucayeque Master (YM) may have house rules that you’ll need to know when creating a character. Also, it could be useful to know what characters the other players are playing to balance the team. Not everyone can be a Taino Naboria.

1. ABILITY SCORES
Roll your character ability scores. Determine each one by rolling the six sided dice, adding 3 to that number, multiply it by 4, divide by 22 and subtracting the number rolled.

2. CHOOSE CLASS AND RACE
Choosing class and race is one of the most important aspects of the games since you can’t play a character without race or class. Also, some classes are better suited to certain races. You may want to select a class that you feel comfortable with. Don’t choose a class that you don’t know how to use. You (and your peers) will find the game much more fun if you don’t have to scroll through pages and pages of yaguas each time you want to cast a spell.
The basic races are Taino, Caribe, Spaniard and African. Race assimilation is also common, mixed races are Mulato and Criollo. The classes are Santero, Naboria, Medico Brujo, Jibaro, Vejigante, Cocinero, Pirate and Colono.

Happiest place on Earth

I'll have to bump my friend's blog with this article.

The subjective well-being rankings are one part of the largest social-science study ever. The World Values Survey, an ongoing investigation by a global network of social scientists, measures social, cultural and political change on all six populated continents.
[...]
Generally, the wealthiest nations tend to be the happiest. But Latin American societies, particularly those around the Caribbean -- Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic -- prove an exception. Inglehart calls it "the Latino bonus."
"They're not the richest people in the world," Inglehart said. "You seem to get a plus for being Latino."

According to the study, Puerto Rico is the happiest place on the planet to live in. Take that, Disney!

more culinary greatness

1 Spam Can
7oz Cheez Whiz
1 or 2 peppers
some milk

blend everything in the food processor.

delicious with bread.

a crimson rose and a gin tonic

I can't drive safely anymore. I am readdicted to Katamari Damacy and I keep thinking in things I could roll up with my Katamari. For a moment I even started to think the names of the things that I could pick up:
Toilet Paper, Cow, Beer Ad, Bike Boy, Old Woman, Police Car.

y&j: yucayeques and jutias

Oubao-Moin

El río de Corozal, el de la leyenda dorada.
La corriente arrastra oro. La corriente está ensangrentada.
El Río Manatuabón tiene la leyenda dorada.
La corriente arrastra oro. La corriente está ensangrentada.
El rio Cibuco escribe su nombre con letra dorada.
La corriente arrastra oro. La corriente está ensangrentada.
Allí se inventó un criadero. Allí el quinto se pagaba.
La tierra era de oro. La tierra está ensangrentada.
En donde hundió la arboleda su raíz en tierra dorada,
allí las ramas chorrean sangre. La arboleda está ensangrentada.
Donde dobló la frente india, bien sea tierra, bien sea agua,
bajo el peso de la cadena, entre los hierros de la ergástula,
allí la tierra hiede a sangre y el agua está ensangrentada.
Donde el negro quebró sus hombros, bien sea tierra o sea agua,
y su cuerpo marcó el carimbo y abrió el látigo su espalda,
allí la tierra hiede a sangre y el agua está ensangrentada.
Donde el blanco pobre ha sufrido los horrores de la peonada,
bajo el machete del mayoral y la libreta de jornada
y el abuso del señorito, allí sea tierra o allí sea agua,
allí la tierra está maldita y corre el agua envenenada.

Juan Antonio Corretjer.
Mulato. Jib(lvl18)Tim(lvl5)

Intellectual, dude!

We met this girl who really wanted to be taken as an intellectual, but it was painfully obvious to everyone in our table that she lacked the new point of view, the life experience, the three-digit IQ, or the literacy skills to pull it off, dude. She, an English major, wasn’t smart enough to just shut the fuck up, dude. You can only talk about how people "should think outside the box, dude" for so long until you start sounding like a Taco Bell commercial, man. To sum it up, I will just quote her: "Dude, I read a lot. And that is why I have a great great great great vocabulary." [sic]

culinary arts

Limbers are delicious and with the hot weather we've been having these days I would love to fill my freezer with limbers de parcha.
I've always wondered how "limber" should be written. I know where the name comes from but I have seen thousands of different ways to spell it.
Someone should make some research on limberology.

gmail

I have used gmail for sometime already and it continues to impress me. It is incredible how they were able to come with so many incredible ideas as to fix e-mail completely. Even if they didn't offer 1 gig storage space gmail would still be my favorite mail service.
The conversation system is wonderful and so obvious that it makes me wonder why it took so much time for some company to invent it. The contacts system is a feature that I rarely used with my other e-mails, but gmail made it perfect.
Now if they would only remove the "invite a friend:" window from my inbox.

The Sandman

I just finished reading The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, for my third time. It is easy to say that The Sandman is the best comic book series ever written. I can say that after reading for the third time the 10 volumes (+2 extra ones) I still keep finding all these little details that shock me, quotes that I can't get out of my head, or just magical moments that touch me.

Each volume composes an arc inside the much longer story, where love, meta-epic, myth, horror, family conflict, a bunch of dreams, stories, and histories are braided together brilliantly. A master piece that changes the reader as Dream (also known as Morpheus, Sandman, Murphy, Oneiros, Lord Shaper, the Prince of Stories, The King of Dreams), the anthropomorphisations of dreaming, changes.

The change is subtle, or not, provoked by his own brothers and sisters of the Endless: Destiny starts his path, Desire provides the catalyst for his romances, and Despair the after taste of his bad choices, Delirium accompanies him in their search for Destruction, and Death is there for everyone, all the time. Along the path he visits hell, provokes the wrath of Morningstar, Lucifer himself, inspires Shakespeare, creates nightmares, has difficulties with his son, faces The Furies, The kindly Ones, and more importantly, defines reality.

If you have a passing interest in mythology, can't believe a comic could be very intelligent and thought provoking, or just want to understand that the Endless are just themselves, not bad, not good, just them, check the series out, you will not be dissapointed.

I'm not blessed, or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do, and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes; in hospitals and forests and abattoirs. For some folks death is a release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them. -Death

Not knowing everything is all that makes it okay, sometimes. -Delirium

Innocence, once lost, can never be regained. -Morningstar

The price of getting what you want, is getting what once you wanted.

P.I.G.S. = Pork Ingesting Golden Shower

I remember I visited a pig farm and a pig was peeing, while another one was drinking the piss, like drinking out of a fountain.

about the pigs

It wasn't a pig farm, it was a slaughter house. They killed the pigs in Saturday mornings so I usually woke up with the screaming of the pigs. Sometimes the pigs broke free and appeared near my house, so I went running to hide under my bed.
Maybe those pigs traumatized me or something because I've always felt some passion for farm animals. About 75% of my nicknames have been pig or cow related.

Hogzilla

Where I was growing up there was a pig farm right behind my house. Whenever they were going to sacrifice an animal, you could hear their panic screeches in my house. My lil bro was deathly afraid of them. If he had nightmares about them, I wouldn't know, but I'm sure it would have been something like Hogzilla, the 8', 800 pounds gigantic pig that was found, and killed, in Georgia. Follow this link for the full article, as well as a picture.