Ok, truth is I have some alcohols in my blood at the moment. But seriously, wtf?

Whoa.

You can notice those nice images next to the commenters of this blog? They’re called gravatars and they provide a way to use a common avatar which is attached to your email address(es) across the web. I’ve seen these for a long while but didn’t really care much to see whatever the hell was up with them until today.

According to the Gravatar website:

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

Samples:

They have a nice Wordpress plugin that can be installed in about two seconds. If you type really like really really fast.

Is that even a word?

I used to get up to 10 emails daily past the Akismet Spam filter into the moderation queue, but now I installed reCAPTCHA also. Let’s see how this rolls out…

Stop Spam, Read Books… and take your PENIS ENLARGEMENT OMG WTF BBQ pills.

Well, new theme then. It’s called Clean Blue Haze and it has a web 2.0`ish look. I had to tweak three things to get it working right:

• first, I had to removed the ugly, inappropriate 5px border it put around the images.
• second, it declared none of the monospaced fonts available on Linux, so I added Bitstream Vera Sans Mono to the font family list
• third, my oh-so-favourite, the hook for the Master Foo quotes plugin.

One of these days I’ll put up a standalone page for my distribution of FastTemplate, but before that I’ll have to brush up its documentation a bit.

Boggy: ohm amp
Boggy: lol
Boggy: wunted to write 'oh man'

I’m about to tell you my last wish a bit later, I just want to make a point before (no, I’m not suicidal, not even close, I love life).

There I was yesterday talking about this and that with my parents and brother, and I heard 3 macabre stories that made me both laugh and ponder at the same time.

The first one was told by my mother, she said that as she was a little child, in a nearby village, preparations for a wedding were taking place. At a certain point, the future bride ate some roasted pig skin (it’s fairly common and traditional in the rural areas of Eastern Europe) and choked. Nobody could help her so she died, and she was buried in the day she was supposed to get married. As that was a pretty remote place between the hills of Transylvania no autopsy was made as there were no medic around to perform it.

Anyway, she was buried in her wedding dress, and had a huge and really beautiful gold necklace. A couple of gypsies were around and noticed the jewelry, and agreed that at night they would come and dig her out, and steal the precious gold. Story says they dug the coffin out and tried to pull the necklace from her neck but it wouldn’t break.

So they tried harder, and harder, until at a certain point the so-thought-dead started coughing. Apparently, when they shook her the stuff that choked her jumped out her throat, as she wasn’t quite dead, she just had huge difficulty breathing.

Now imagine the “jesus-tapdancing-christ” look on the gypsies face! I don’t think it’s medically possible, but their hair must’ve instantly bleached.

My mother says that woman must still be alive, as she would be around 60 years old now.

The other story I heard was about a girl who died, and was buried in the town’s cemetery. For the week after the burial, her mother had constant dreams about her crying for help. The mother said she could not live any longer until she knew that this was just a dream, so the coffin was excavated.

There, they found the body lying face down, and had biting bruises on the right arm. People concluded that the only way the body could’ve rolled was that she must’ve been alive when she was buried, and the bites were traces of her desperation and such. If she were alive when she was buried I don’t think she lasted for too long down there, as the oxygen must’ve run out pretty quickly.

And the last one is quite funny actually, to a certain point. It’s about this old lady in the hospital who died and was taken to the morgue. She was placed on a table awaiting autopsy, and for some reason the doctor was not in the hospital when he should’ve performed it. Anyway, a woman in the morgue staff was walking around whistling some song, when all out of a sudden, from the autopsy table, the old lady said “dear lady, how can you be whistling happily over there, when I’m in the chilling cold here”. The nurse had a heart attack and passed away.

It appears that the old lady was not quite dead, either. Anyway, as the personnel showed up they were astonished by the fact that the old lady was alive (and shocked that their colleague was, well, dead) and took her back to her reserve she used to be sharing with a couple other old ladies. When the patient in the next bed saw her, after seeing her pass away the previous day, she was crying “the dead is here, the dead is here” as she was jumping out the 1st floor window of the hospital.

I was saying about my last wish. Yeah. When I pass away, do me a favor, whoever you are. Glock -> my face -> two shots. Three, if it makes you happy. Or even 4, if it makes you uber mega trigger happy. I would hate to wake up 2 meters underground, running low on oxygen, or seconds before my incineration. Totally hate it. Hate it +5.

The suspense is terrible. I hope it’ll last.

Everybody’s talking about it, even little kids on the street, it’s the ancient, heart filling, uplifting story of the Battle of Thermopylae, told through the stylus of the so gifted Frank Miller. Last weekend I got my hands on the graphic novel of 300 published by Dark Horse comics and I simply devoured it, page by page. The story is very well written, the narrator’s comments blend in with the action in a fascinating way. I really recommend to make an effort of will power and read it before watching the movie, it will make it much more enjoyable.

Onward with the movie adaptation: the visuals are a story by themselves as they plunge the viewer in the tense, nerve wrecking atmosphere of Greece, confronted with an army far larger than they are able to assemble, facing annihilation (well, most of it because of its own political/religious powers within the state).

The actors are a surprise - most of them are unknown to the large public, but the acting of a handful few is something to note down.

Gerard Butler (Leonidas) might just have made the role of his life in 300, I think his acting is above Mel Gibson’s William Wallace and Russel Crowe’s Maximus and his inspirational speeches, though limitative (laconic, one might say ), show what a spartan is made of. If I were to grade him, he’d easily get a big round 9.6/10 (don’t ask me how I got that number).

Lena Headey (Queen Gorgo), has good, and has not so good moments through out the movie, as the scene where she addresses the council could’ve been a lot better. Again, if I were to grade her, a 9/10 would characterize her acting. She has boobs.

Dominic West (Theron) acts the role of a piece of shit, but he does it well. A 9.2/10 for the scumbag.

David Wenham (Dilios) does OK, especially at the ending. I’d say a 9.1/10 would suffice.

Michael Fassbender (Stelios) has some talent there, he could go big some time. The whipping scene is definitory for him, as well as his death scene. A good 9.3/10 for him.

Rodrigo Santoro (Xerxes) portrays the so-called God Xerxes decently (worth noting the king’s queery gestures), but he could’ve done better. An 8.5/10 for him.

All in all, 300 is one of the movies that did not let me down, and one of which I am glad I got the chance to see. If you have a couple of bucks, go see the movie. If you don’t have them, borrow, it’s worth it. It definitely earned its place in the “Best Movies Ever” gallery. As Mark Cronan from Comic Book Resources put it: “[the movie left me] with a feeling of power, from having been witness to something grand”.

In case you were wondering, the name of the song from the 300 trailer is Just Like You Imagined from Nine Inch Nails.

Sparta it is, chaps. Sparta it is.