(A short story loosely based on Shadow Wrought's guidelines. I'm posting this in my journal because I'm an idiot and got myself banned again.)

It all happened one fine Wednesday eve, when I was watching Soccer on TV. I suddenly heard a strange sound, as if someone had crumbled a candy wrapper. I turned around, and something hit my face, something resembling ink, instantly blinding me. The last thing I saw before the darkness set was my Remington typewriter, grinning...

Fortunately, a friend of mine, a retired rally driver, came round and rescued me. An unfortunate accident had left him without both arms, able to eat only plankton. He had two large fishtanks in his kitchen, both filled with icky green goo. These also served as a power generator for his house -- or was it haunted?

He had lost his arms when the car he was driving hit a roadblock. I had thought that this had made him more patient, but I was wrong. Using just his legs, he jammed the damned machine, rendering it powerless -- and useless...

He ended his life falling into a live volcano -- but it was no accident! I know this, because they sent me his luggage and other remaining personal effects. Among these, written on a napkin stolen from the hotel bar, a suicide note.

Which comes first, 7 or 8?

Ok, now I have a problem. I've somehow managed to lose (err, misplace) my head. I'm quite sure it was in its right place when I woke up in the morning. But now it's gone. I've misplaced it. I've looked everywhere, yet haven't found it. And now I'm about to lose my mind as well -- which is just as well, as what use is a mind anyway if you don't have a head to keep it in?

So, as I was saying, I must have misplaced my head somewhere. Or maybe it just fell off the neck? Yes, it could be. It must have fallen off while I was cycling. In which case, it is lost forever -- just like the cap of my drinking bottle. But...no, it can't be. I clearly remember that I still had my head on when I got back. So it must be somewhere in my home. Or maybe it's on the Internet? Can I lose something on the Internet? Can something go missing on the Internet?

Have you seen in lying around anywhere? I would really like to get it back. Because it's really difficult to live without your head. Can't properly keep your balance, can't keep your blood cool (that's what the brain is for, right?) and so on.

Help me.

If you post a dupe, the bots will be all over you for posting a dupe.

If you pull the dupe, the bots will be all over you for pulling the dupe, because now they cannot flame you for the dupe.

Solution? Keep posting dupes. This will keep the bots content.

Note: This is sort of a reply to ellem's JE. The reason why I'm replying to his JE in my journal is very simple: my, err, misbehaviour got me temporarily banned from posting comments. Yay. Anyway, here goes (and I should warn you in advance that I will actually end up not replying to his question):

All sorts of people have told me that I should write something. Like a book. Back in August when I was feeling all miserable because it was August (I can't stand that bloody month), a friend told me to write a book to have something to do with all the free time I had. I started planning it, but it's still in a very early planning phase...

Then another person asked me to write a story for her, so I decided that I'd write that book (the one I'll probably never finish) for her. So far...well, I have a few pages written, but the thing is, none of my stories are generally longer than one page. Or half a page. Or something like that. The main reason is, they lack a plot. A storyline. They just happen -- they come up to my head when I happen to feel like writing something. They also lack characters. Yes, something does happen to someone in them, but I don't know nothing about these people. Or animals. Why do these things happen to them? Why do they do the things they do (they usually don't do much)? Or don't.

Back in July, someone said that she'd like to be me. Because then she'd know what goes on in that head of mine. I laughed and said that she really doesn't want to know. Because it's dark in there. And things just come out of this darkness like...turds from a jammed toilet.

[Ed.] Half the ban's been lifted; the AC ban still stands. Looks like I'll have to play nice for a while :7

All Pulp songs are about sex.

How 'bout a custom stylesheet competition? We could call it the great slashdot rice-up. Just an idea...

Ed. Taco is supplying the prizes: some sort of official contest to re-design Slashdot is coming soon

Have you committed "the worst sin"? Are you feeling remorse, yet don't dare to confess to a minister (or even the Pope)? Don't worry, for repenting has been made easy now. How easy? Well, with the iGod, you'll have a direct connection to God, nothing less.

In other news, Opera is now free as in beer, without ads.

Well, maybe a bit. Maybe a lot (as evidenced by my current front page activities...). Or maybe I'm just tired from the day -- it's been a long one (at least by my standards). got up at seven, got to the library by nine and spent the next three hours there reading old literary journals (old = from 1941).

These journals were a bit strange to read. Not only because of their content (Stalinism at its finest), but also because of the paper they were printed on -- thick paper that had turned yellow in time, smelling of dust and old bookshelves. Also, in many cases, some of the pages of these 60-year-old journals were uncut -- noone had ever bothered to actually read this trite.

Then, at twelve, I had a seminar where I had to stand up and speak (oh! the horror!) about that bloody BA thesis I wrote last spring. No, I don't want to talk about it. I didn't really want to talk about it today, either, but still got my act together and did it. Yay me. Let it be said for the record that I hate speaking in public. It feels like pulling the words out with a pair of tongues.

In contrast, I don't seem to have a problem with acting -- at least not in front of people I know. After that seminar, I was left in the same lecture room with a few friends. We were talking about all sorts of stuff, and somehow, this turned into me giving them a "perfomance" on the subject of Nietzsche being dead (amongst other things). I also reduced all Philosohpy into a dot.

Then I spent another few hours in the library, and finally got home at seven.

And now I'm tired, so I think I'd better go to bed now.

If you haven't been to the front page in ages (or haven't ever heard of such place), then now is the time to go there and tell those young whippersnappers that 30 is not middle-aged.

Meanwhile, I'll just lay back and listen to Pulp's Help The Aged.

Bleh. I've been trying to post this for a few days now, but somehow I can't figure out how to serve this...game. And some of you have probably already seen it, so...Anyway, if you've built up a lot of stress in flamewars over hurricane Katrina and are feeling all tense now, then I suggest that you play the Katrina: The Gathering collectible card game to relax a bit.

From the same people that brought you Tetris 1d, here's the first mono multiplayer game (MoMPG) ever: Twinoo. In this fast-paced, action-packed game, you'll have to pit the right hemisphere of your brain against the left hemisphere. At the same time, you'll have to cooperate with your "other self", for all it takes is three mistakes from either hemisphere and the game is over.

And yeah, it will make your brain hurt.

The award for The Most Beautiful Site I've Seen Today goes to Fantastic Zoology -- a complete series of illustration for Jorge Luis Borges "Book of Imaginary Beings". If you've always wondered what the Odradek, the Burak, or An Experimental Account of What Was Known, Seen, and Met by Mrs. Jane Lead in London in 1694, then now you have the perfect chance to find out. I would advise against browsing the site late at night, though, as some of these creatures are quite haunting...

A million monkeys with typewriters will never be able to reproduce Hamlet. The reason for this is very simple: They are million monkeys with typewriters, not [a] Shakespeare with [a] quill.

Now, I'm sure that Shakespeare would have produced Hamlet even if he had used a tpyewriter instead of a quill. Would it have turned out the same, I'm not so sure of (for Marshall McLuhan or someone else believing in the mantra The Medium is the Message, the answer would be a definite "No").

Which one is more important then, the Shakespeare or the quill? Yeah, it's a rhetorical question, one that I don't even need to answer myself (I hope). Yet, there is still something about the instrument, the medium used for writing that makes a difference -- if not for the writer, then for the reader.

Let's take electronic mail, for example (for the purpose of this JE, let JEs and comments also count as electronic mail). While I, or someone else, will put the same effort into writing an email as writing a letter on paper, there's still some things that email lacks. First off, there's no handwriting. The writing style may be the same, but the shape of the words is...different (at the same time, it's always the same -- due to standard fonts used).

Then there's the things you can't do with an electronic "letter". You can read it over and over, but there will never be a mark on the letter of you reading it. The letters (err, characters) never wear off. As memory, it is perfect, as it never forgets anything. But such a perfect memory is also quite useless, as it creates nothing new. No information about the reader.

An illustration:

To resume: The long, typewritten, four-year-old letter that Zooey had checked into the bathtub with, on this Monday morning in November, 1955, had obviously been taken out of its envelope and unfolded and refolded on too many private occasions during the four years, so that now it not only had an over-all unappetitlich appearance but was actually torn in several places, mostly along the creases. [...]

Curiously enough, the same description more or less also applies to the book this passage is taken from. The edges of the covers are torn and tattered. The corners of the pages have been worn round; some of them also dyed orange by a leaking text marker. But the pages still smell of incense -- just like they did four years ago when I picked this book up in a small bookstore.

This small book is as second-hand as a book can be. It seems to have had at least three owners before me: someone bought it new sometime round 1970, but then sold it/gave it away. Then someone called Peggy bought it (second-hand), and sent it to a Finn called Terjo (it's a guy's name if I'm not mistaken). After that, the book somehow wound up in this small bookstore in Estonia, and I find it very unlikely that this Finnish guy had brought it there. All these people, that little book "remembers" -- and it doesn't even matter to me if these "memories" are false.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like dead trees.

Last night, I had a dream of undead people. Vampires, to be more precise. They had been killed and brought back to life. The frightening thing was that I knew each and every one of them. The funny thing was that they were all good to me. They didn't want me to become a vampire.

The dream started off innocently enough, with me taking pictures of apples, and then of some sort of a University building in Helsinki. Of course, it was all in my dream; it wasn't really Helsinki. Just like the island in the last part of the dream wasn't the island of Pakri (I've never been there). The dream ended with me running away from someone -- and then being sucked into the sand-covered ground where the narrow path I was running down ended. I quickly dug some more sand on top of myself (to better hide myself), and then the person hunting me arrived. He even stepped on my head, but fortunately didn't notice me. So I held my breath and waited for him(?) to leave. And then I woke up.

Two weeks ago, I had a dream where Rubens Barrichello had died in a crash, and Michael Schumacher was crying (in the wardrobe of my old school!) because he wasn't told about it until the race was over.

A week before that, I had a dream where Adrian had fallen on an iron fence and one of the iron rods had penetrated through his stomach. There was no bleeding, but he looked awful. Terrified. Scared to death. We all knew he was going to die (how can you live if an iron rod has gone through your backbone?), but we lied to him, saying that he's going to be ok. Then the ambulance came and took him away. A few hours or so later, he was back, and he looked as cheerful as ever, as if nothing had happened to him.

...and so on. There have been other bizarre dreams as well, but you can only have these three. Take 'em or leave 'em.

It is now official. Ellem confirms it: my journal is dead. I just can't think of anything to write about.

...