Riipas Blog

Being at home in Chemnitz is always this annoying "same shit, different day" experience. Every time I come around, I hope that some things might have changed as if by magic, but of course they didn't and they never will. While we had a real cool time last week in Hungary I didn't fancy coming here, but I braced myself up and did it anyway. I should have known better...
Just to make the bad things a little worse I did fell ill with an bronchitis. The doc prescribed me some drugs but neither do I feel better nor do I see colourful lights at least. Gnarf!!!
Anyway I do look forward to meeting Ronny this week. One of the rare good things about being here.
To cheer me up a bit, I bought the beautiful and most luxurious Collectors Edition of Starcraft 2. Even though I'm usually not into real time strategy games, I used to love each and every RTS game done by Blizzard. Right now I didn't play much more than two missions, but the game already made a very good impression. The collectors edition is armed with a lot of cool stuff like a 2GB USB flash drive replica of one of the games characters dog tag, which comes preloaded with the original StarCraft and the StarCraft: Brood War expansion set, the inevitable soundtrack CD, a comic book, a gigantic art book and a vanity pet for each of my World of Warcraft characters. All told this box is kind of expensive but well worth it. It's just awesome, so get this game! (I didn't expect anything less Blizzard!) Now I go for some more slaughtering, I can't sleep anyway, because of the stuffed-up nose and the shortage of breath. Damn bronchitis!

With yesterdays news being kind of depressing it's time to take a look on the bright side life. Today our team went playing golf at the Golf Resort Pankow which was great fun. We practised the most basic things on the driving range before we moved on to a 3-hole training course where everybody is allowed to play. Of course we played like shit, but it's good to know that there's a place nearby, where you can practise golf without having a licence or having to pay club fee.
Also the HTC Hero I carry with me got an update to Android 2.1 today. Even though this update isn't officially released for Germany, David found out a pretty easy way to get it anyway. I just had to set the phones date to 2011 and instantly a message popped up, telling me of an update being ready to download. When I chose the HTC Hero as one of our test devices, I was pretty confident that over time HTC would give a lot of sweet love to what was there flagship phone back then, but the exact opposite did happen. Prior to this 2.1-Update the Hero was one of the last devices that had to deal with crappy Android 1.5, there were no updates to 1.6 or whatsoever. Now it seems as if the old Hero is back into play with free navigation, Google Goggles and all the other cool stuff that comes with Android 2.1. YEEEHAW!
And to make this day even better my World of Warcraft druid got the ultra-cool and pretty rare blue protodrake mount dropped at the Utgarde pinnacle. Yeah, another rare mount for one of my chars, even if it's not my main char! Hey fate, more of these days please!

Yesterday Karsten pointed me to an animation done by Isao Hashimoto that is apparently seven years old but which I didn't know until now. The animation is named "1945-1998" and shows each and every detonation of a nuclear bomb in the same years.
While everyone is well aware that nuclear weapons have been tested over and over again, I was kind of shocked that "over and over again" doesn't refer to a number like two hundred or maybe even five hundred. Not that anyone on earth would have needed to detonate two hundred nukes for any reason... but what the nuclear powers did is worse. They ignited more than two thousand nukes from 1945 to 1998. Watch the animation here, it's a must see in my opinion!
As if that's not enough madness for one day I stumbled into web forum for Nazis*. Reading the crap those shitheads spill into the world is just sickening and stresses my strong belief in absolute freedom of speech a lot. People discussing about "racially incorrect" couples and Jewish people being congenital bonded to be criminals feels so disgusting and makes me rage in helpless anger. It makes me want to cry "Somebody DO something about this..." but I know it doesn't make any sense to ban such stuff. Those people just move their servers to another country that does not forbid and suddenly internationalisation is not that bad any more...



So, everybody: DO something! Talk, educate, be cross and maybe most importantly: Don't turn away but intervene! Sage NEIN!

*I thought long about linking to this crap, because seeing is believing and maybe it would have helped raising awareness. Also I am quite confident that non of the people reading this will be seduced by the simple "truths" of these people. But then again I am responsible for the links on my page and I decided not to take any risk by linking to anti-constitutional and prolly indictable stuff.

Even though I am not (yet?) into this whole microblogging thing and even though I definitely do not need more things that are able to distract me from work, I created a twitter account today. What for I really don't know, but maybe it's a exercise being confined to 140 characters. Maybe it'll help to polish my texts, to make them more slender and more precise. We'll see.
Unfortunately the nickname "Riipa" was already in use and I had to find another. Neither was I ready to abandon my nickname completely nor did I want to use one of those cryptic names like riipa77_de. After something like an hour of try and error I remembered Neil Gaiman's account Neilhimself... hence I proudly present my Twitter account Riipahimself.