the-shrike.net

The amount of incredibly moving stories of victims, rescuers, volunteers is simply shocking at the moment. I have been collecting newspapers of all the stories, and telling them in the form of comic strips. I hope these stories could show the UK readers the love, warmth and courage of the Chinese people, also the sad and cruel reality of the horrible 5.12 Earthquake.

This series of comic will make you cry… it sure made me cry. Those illustrations are moving, and the stories told just tear you apart.
Something sure worth reading and sharing.

(Here’s a link to the author website.)

aka (赤)
Originally uploaded by curson

I’ve finally decided to publish my irssi IRC client theme. It’s kind of a coming out, I’ve been tuning this theme to my liking for the past 5-6 years, bits by bits, slowly adjusting to what I prefer.
I really hope someone would find this interesting and appealing as his/her own theme. I’ve sent an email to the irssi team in order for it to be added on the main gallery of the irssi.org website, which would be quite c00l for an irssi lover as I am.

Any eventual feedback is of course very welcome.
The file is here: aka.theme. Just put it in .irssi/ and load it by issuing the command /set theme aka in Irssi.
Enjoy! ;)

This title is probably going to win me some more monthly visits, from people looking for the oh-so-cute Keira Knightley, but even if the real deal here is still about total cuteness, we’re speaking about something with definitely more fur :p

My family, back in Milan, has a new member!
Four months old, cute as hell, apparently eagerly hungry 24 hours a day, and as it is supposed to be very playful.

Please welcome Keira:

Other three pictures can be found here :)

I’m sad I won’t be living with her, I’m really missing a cat in my life, but still I’m incredibly happy to know there’s one again in my family. *yay*

Luna Rossa is the first finalist of the 2007 Louis Vuitton Cup!
It took only 6 matches to beat Oracle, and victory couldn’t have been sweeter against the US team (ok I confess, I do not exactly like them very much). Now we only have to wait for the designation of our challenger in the finals. Right now Team New Zealand is leading 4 against 2 with Desafio Espanol 2007… so who’s next? ;)

A shame I won’t be able to watch the rest of the semi-final matches as the rest of the Cup ’cause I will be busy moving to London and starting a new job!
Well, this is life, isn’t it?

It has been a while since the last time I narrated an eXalted campaign/adventure, and that’s a real pity. I love to play RPGs, I love to be a narrator, and I go crazy for eXalted, but sometimes you have to realize you’re doing a job that doesn’t leave you with a lot of free (and programmable in advance) time to play and to do what you love.

Anyway, my dear friend Silvia is a great miniature painter, and after a secret project that lasted for almost 1 year and half, we were able to deliver to my now ex-players (with whom I still play eXalted when I can, but not as a narrator anymore…) their characters miniatures.

Here I present you the Delorha’s Circle.

Gorgeous, isn’t that? ;)

Being 27 is fun, even when you don’t have a proper (at least in the common meaning of the term…) birthday to celebrate.
But let’s say it’s even funnier when your neighbour/friends get the right idea for a fantastic gift, and happen to walk through your door hanging a big red box that seems to weight quite a lot. And it’s (finally) definitely amazing when you open it to realize that it’s full of 27 different varieties of beer (in bottle and tin), one for each of the year you’re old.

A great gift indeed, which reminds me of my sister’s one for my 26th birthday, even if this one is definitely huger. What I really need now are some money to buy me a set of proper glasses to taste all that beer… this reminds me I am still without a job ¬_¬

Anyway: good 1st of March and a good non-birthday to everyone out there!

(the picture is even the living proof that the 3.2MP camera of my N73 rocks, and that this mobile even works as a USB mass-storage device under Linux without a flaw. Amazing! But that’s another story.)

…my furry ball will be greatly missed.
From now, and forever :°

Farewell my beloved and dear minnie…

I love manga, as everyone already knows.
I am a geek, as everyone already knows.
I love to name things I own, as probably almost everyone already knows.

That’s why Killy is born!

Killy (name derived from the amazing character of the more than just fantastic BLAME! manga series by Tsutomu Nihei) is nothing less than my new cell-phone, a shiny new HSDPA clamshell phone by Samsung: the SGH-Z560.
By now, after playing around with it since about 6-7 days I’m quite satisfied by it, with two only remarks: one about the (well-known) not-so-long battery life (could have definitely been longer…) and the second one with the low styling options it has for themes and character display (way too bigger for my tastes). Both issues are anyway quite bearable without any huge problem, and while using 3G and HSDPA network service is really fast.
And I mean FAST. That’s what is made for… after all.

Well, my first toughts were about trying the 2.0MP camera, one of the main feature I bought it for, to see how pictures would have looked on it. For what I’ve seen so far, it deals perfectly with outside scenery (see above, another here) while it suffers bad from low light scenery (like interiors) compensating with quite a lot of blurring noise.

In all those three cases, the 1600×1200 version (higher resolution possible, even if it seems that Flickr is resizing them to 1024×768, probably because I have a free account) shows huge disturbing sings of low quality, while when seeing the pictures at lower resolution everything seems more than just “lookable” and the results are pretty what I was expecting.
Perfect from my needs for my point-and-shot behaviour.

Soon (time permitting) will follow a brief HOW-TO about how to connect a SGH-Z560 with a Gentoo driven computer (belial in my case, my Thinkpad x60s) via Bluetooth. It’s easy, but even for future personal reference, I’d like to sum things up! :)

Floating around the net following the main stream from one link to another one, lead me to a wonderful photoblog.
I still have to go through all the pictures, but there are some amazing views of Edinburgh (like this or this) as well as to other subjects, including, San Francisco…
Curious, both two cities I’ve been always quite been fascinated about.
Anyway, thanks to the author (Paul - at least this’s stated by his whislist title) for a nice and well appreciated addiction to my favourites RSS feeds list :)

Update: if you want a good place where to start your photoblogging browsing experience, there’s not better place than Photoblogs.org.

Like every father does: I take picture of my little baby! :D

Right now I’m still playing with it under Windows (bleah… after 4 years of Linux only, that thing seems worse than usual), but it’s really an interesting machine.
I’m gonna have a lot of fun!

By observing a rare head-on collision of galaxies at 10 million miles per hour, astronomers have made the first direct detection of “dark matter”–the mysterious, invisible stuff that comprises at least one-quarter of the universe.

Here is the entire news post on the National Science Foundation website about this discovery, that will be soon published on the forthcoming issues of the Astrophysical Journal and Astrophysical Journal Letters.
If you don’t want to read the whole story, just take a look at the picture. Images like these (just like Hubble deep field ones) always amuse me in a sort of magical way.

Actually, I’d like to read something more about this topic: I’ll take my time to search the internet for something else about it.

Oh, the fun thing about it, is that I found the link to the news in the newsgroup alt.geek (in particular: here).
Gosh, I love internet!

A new painting of François Baranger appeared recently on Dan Simmons’ website. It’s another portrait of the mighty Shrike from the Hyperion saga written by Simmons himself.
That’s not only one of the most amazing thing I’ve ever read, but as you can clearly understand by the name of this domain the Shrike is my favourite character from the books.

While I’m still waiting to hear the big news about the making of a movie on that story, it’s really nice to see in pictures things that I’m so used to imagine in my mind (after reading all the four books saga about three times by now, I’ve a clear imagination about everything that’s inside it - I must say I’ve only read Lord of The Ring more: seven times in total…) pictured in such an amazing way.

© of François Baranger

There are another two different versions of the Shrike on Baranger’s webpage, in the paintings 2002-2004 section. Take a look at them (and at all his other workings… they’re worth it) and follow my advice: read the Hyperion saga. NOW!