For the past few days I’ve been writing like mad, today especially, mad mad amounts of writing!

But then I found out it took me seven fucking days to write a proper day’s quota, that is to say, I only wrote a bloody 1700 words. But anyway, here they are.

“Heh, just like ol’ Montgomery did always said, unpreparedness o’ the young ‘ll be the undoin’ o’ ever’thing we fight for t’day. I suppose ye could find tools in yonder shed”

Moe was greeted by a stone building two storeys high and overgrowing with vines, which is strange considering all of this was happening in the desert. The front face of the building was dominated by a huge hangar door that could swallow a mid-sized fixed-wing aerocraft or something similar. Languishing there was also an old bicycle that hasn’t been moved in ages and was weathered to the point where its original colour was indescernible.

The door looked like it would collapse into dust with the lightest of touches. But it wouldn’t budge no matter how much Moe kicked and punched at it. Desert sand must’ve grimed up all the wheel bearings.

He toiled and he toiled until, quite by chance, he found a small door embedded in the wood. It was probably a service entry of some sort. They didn’t build things like these where Moe was from, but he guessed that it was necessary in the desert with the sand blowing everywhere to still get inside … although why they didn’t just build an underground tunnel with an elevator going down from the surface to get inside was beyond him. It was a much better solution since winds would blow above the elevator opening and even when some sand did get inside it would be restricted to the outer airlock.

Obviously our dear Moe was too much a geek to realise that sometimes you don’t need a perfect solution when a good enough solution can be built at the fraction of the cost and effort. He was a bit silly like that, but I think the best Von Tropp’s students always turned out like that.

“JOE! COME OVER HERE! BRING THE PRANCER!”

Only a few streaks of light from missing roof tiles broke the darkness that was inside. The floor was covered in a thick crust of dust a large portion of which flared up into the air and started frolicking in the light when Moe disturbed the ancient atmosphere with his entry.

Moe could discern the shapes of two war-era biwingular flying machines with tools still around them like somebody was still mending them and just stepped out for a cup of tea.

Luckily they didn’t leave their bodies behind.

Above the floor there was a five foot wide balcony running all around the hall’s inside with art nouveau -ish guard rails. It was probably used back in the day to work on taller machinery like early walkers and perhaps even an aero ship. Or simply to provide a better vantage point for everyone coordinating the delicate ballet of many people and machines moving about in a constricted space. Impossible to tell really, but Moe liked it …

… he could build scaffolding to work on the prancer’s hurt leg out of the guard rail.

The now very obviously injured prancer slowly limped to the shed and all but collapsed into a heap of screeching metal, hissing valves, sighing pneumatics and whining steam turbines. Joe looked at Moe with a compassionate tear in her eye.

“We’ll get ‘er up and running again dear, I’m sure we will.”

“Mmmyes … we better get started, there’s only so much daylight left and I really don’t want to be stuck here all night with that creepy old dude over there.”

Joe jumped out of the cockpit and they started disassembling the guard rails.

Knocking on the door.

Nothing.

More knocking.

Nothing.

Knocking!

“What do you want!?”

Joe was disturbed by some incredibly rude and insolent person right in the middle of a delicate experiment involving syringes, mammals, lizards and a vein embalming solution.

Professor Foglio put her in charge of testing her new chemical that could plastify an animal’s veins within moments of being administered. This was all rather cruel since it’s rather deadly in a bit of a messy way to experience the complete solidification and perfect preservation of your cardiovascular system but both the professor and Joe were somewhat convinced the method could be put to some sort of good use some time in the future … almost certain of it in fact … but of course, at the moment, it was just an incredibly cool thing to be able to do.

“Err … you never made it to our appointment and I just wanted to see if everything was alright …”

“What appointment? Look man, you are disturbing delicate research here!”

“Uuhhh, you wanted to meet me at the cafeteria today … we spoke on the pneumophone …”

“What time is it?”

Moe was distraught.

“It’s six post merridiam!”

“Dear god! That late already!? I was supposed to meet someone at the cafeteria two hours ago!”

Joe frantically got up to rush to that place lest the person leaves.

“That’s why I’m here damn it! Were you even listening?”

“…. Moe?”

“YES!”

“Well you’re here now so everything is well I hope. Come, we can go to the pastry shop; I’m becoming rather peckish, seems I’ve neglected to eat today.”

It was the young couple’s first date and already the tone was set, she was primarily a scientist, he was a man madly in doubt and questioning over what the fuck he’s gotten himself into.

The pastry shop doubled for a tea shop and to every each one of its patrons’ delight, there was almost nobody who ever ordered coffee lest its pungent smell would disrupt the delicate aromae of carefully blended teas and lovingly baked pastries.

Moe could only look at Joe’s pretty eyes and the cute curvature of her nose and the lovely perkiness of her ears and the loving blush on her cheeks and the … curvaceous … uhm … bump under her blouse – she despised corsets by the by, said they hindered her scientific work, but I think she was just a raging feminist – and the deep dark shade of her raven hair and … well he loved simply everything.

Except for the pile of crumbs.

See, this time it wasn’t that Moe was stricken dumb by her angel-like appearance, he absolutely positively wanted and could talk to Joe this time. But he couldn’t because she was stuffing her face full of a pile of cakes sitting in front of her. It may be that she was nervous being out on a date with a boy for the first time, or perhaps she was just desperately hungry.

To be honest not much more of interest happened that evening and a gentleman really isn’t supposed to tell anyway …

… but I’ll tell you anyway that after Joe was sufficiently sated they had a rather lovely evening if you know what I mean.

Within an hour the guard-rail scaffolding encircled the prancer – I should probably give him a name for the lulz – and the problem had been diagnosed as a faulty spring valve incorrectly distributing pressure to one of the four joints in the leg. To make matters worse the whole joint was showing signs of stress resulting from pressure problems in the frictionless aerojointing system causing undue grinding of the metal.

For all us regular people – the prancer had a boo-boo on his knee.

Moe and Joe, Joe and Moe (try saying that in quick succession a few times) were now scavenging through the deserted hangar to find a replacement joint for the prancer. They knew pneumatic joints haven’t been invented back when the hangar was in full swing, but if they could find a sturdy enough ball-bearing joint from say, an aerocraft engine, they could figure out a solution to last them long enough to get to Von Tropp and bring him the bats he wanted.

Their traveling speed would be somewhat reduced of course, but better than with a limp.

One of those dusty biwingular machines we’ve mentioned earlier was the perfect target to begin their scavenging efforts upon.

And they got to it. My god how they got to it! The poor thing had its canvas torn to bits, positively shredded, in minutes!

SHRIEK!

It was Joe.

Moe ran to her aid.

She was cowering on the floor whimpering senseless babble.

No other words were spoken.

Joe looked in the direction her trembling finger was pointing.

GASP!

There, hiding behind a sheet of nearly ripped-off canvas, was a man. It wasn’t a living man, but it looked like a man. The thing was wearing a perfectly preserved war-era aeoronautical garb with a leather vest, leather goggles, leather aeorman cap and a lovely white scarf.

It would be an absolutely marvelous sight to behold if it wasn’t a dried up mummy of a real person. The pained expression on his face and the wild twist of his fingers seemed to indicate a horrible death in a cloud of nervous gas.

There could be more of these anywhere.

Suddenly exploration didn’t seem so much fun to Moe and Joe anymore …

They quickly unbolted the engine from the fuselage in complete quietude and devoid of all joy a technology freak finds in exploring old machinery. Only the scratching of dry bolts against their socket cut through the arid silence of the large hall, solemnly sprinkled with intermitent rays of sunlight.

Outside, the atmosphere’s thickness and gravity of how painful the last hours of that hangar must have been, were weighing down on them no less and it could easily be said that their otherwise rather lovely day was quite ruined.

After mending the prancer’s leg they went back to the station to see if the attendant really didn’t have any water, but when Moe started opening his mouth to ask something different came out.

“What happened back there?”

“Ye mean th’ shed?”

“Yes, the hangar, we saw a mummy in one of the machines. What happened to all the people working there, where are they?”

“Them people all be dead me laddy. T’was a bom’ they dropped right on our blast’d heads. Them guys fighting for the wrong sid’ o’ th’ war they did. Damn nearly ‘d not escape the clouds o’ that ‘orrible poison”

“You don’t mean to say you were alive back then old timer, that was ages ago.”

“Ah me boy, o’ course I was alive then. It’s been only ten years sinc’ th’ war.”

“That’s impossible, those mummies are at least a hundred years old by the looks of them and everything we’ve ever been taught and ‘ve read anywhere says the war ended a long time ago”

“Ah, for ye it might’ve, but ‘round these ‘ere parts the war is still full well and kickin’. Ye best get outta ‘ere fast as ye can, lest them idiots drop a bom’ on ye ‘s well.”

For several months I have been meaning to get my lazy bum off the proverbial chair and make a projects page listing every interesting-ish thing I’ve ever worked on. Most say this helps in finding employers and blahblahblah.

For me having such a page is all about knowing what I’ve worked on because I’ve noticed there is just so much stuff I can’t for the life of me remember everything when I want to and just end up listing random things off the top of my head. This is obviously bad.

Another reason why I wanted to create such a page was to have a place to store the art I occasionally do because a lot of it has simply vanished into history … not in the least bit due to my destructive nature of often destroying things I deem unworthy of being remembered. All of the poetry I’ve ever written has thus vanished into oblivion one day, all 90 pages of it.

If you turn your attention towards the portfolio, you will notice that there are some things really unworthy of mention in there, specifically true of the first two webcomics and Urbanislovar, but I felt they are ultimately an important piece of who I am and are thus included for completenes’ sake.

Anywho, it was fun creating this thing even if it did take four hours last night. The sheer amount of stuff I’ve done dumbfounds me … where’d my life go? Where is all the partying? The crack and hos? I’m gonna have an incredibly fun midlife crysis in a few decades won’t I?

Oh and by the way, Cthulhu and other crazies, the webcomic that gave its name to this blog and was the sole reason swizec.com even exists today has been fully backed up to the portfolio I actually think this one was almost good, the writing was a bit stiff and the drawing a bit lame, but I like it anyway … might eventually continue.

PS: the best thing about that Cthulhu webcomic is the technology style I invented, this was before I’d ever heard of steampunk and notice how it adopts the same kind of features? Futuristic history, love it. Seriously, have a look at those 8 pages or so of comic, you’ll breeze through it. Unlike myself who spent around 60 to 80 hours making each page …

Tokrat za spremembo pišem v slovenščini, ker se spodobi.

Danes navsezgodaj zjutraj se je internet prebudil z novico, da so reševalci na Langtang Lirungu namesto Tomaža Humarja našli samo še njegove posmrtne ostanke. Eden naših največjih alpinistov, priznam, edini za katerega sploh vem, je bojda umrl v začetku tega tedna – predvidoma, za posledicami zlomljene noge in drugih komplikacij, ki jih taka poškodba prinese v alpinizmu.

Marsikomu se Humar mogoče zdi nor, ker se sploh spušča v take dogodivščine. Vemo, da je pred leti prejel neizmerne količine kritik okoli reševanja z Nanga Parbata in da je bilo o njem povedano precej stvari, ki ne pritičejo izobraženemu človeku. Nikol ne bom pozabil kako je moj profesor za slovenščino takrat veselo razlagal, da kaj se pa Humar zdaj gre, da nateguje celo državo – sam se je spravljal v zos, naj se zdaj sam še reši. No evo mister Lazar, da slišimo, kaj boste svojim učencem razlagali zdaj

Ampak vse to zdaj ni več važno, Humarja ni več, umrl pa je na najboljši možen način; pri početju tega, kar ga veseli, večina med nami si lahko samo v sanjah želi takega konca in prav zaradi tega bi moral Humar v slovenskih krogih postati legenda Morrisonovega ali Hendrixovega kalibra.

Pa vsi vemo, da ne bo. Slovenci nimamo navade delati herojev iz ljudi, ki so pripravljeni (namenoma ali ne) zastaviti življenje za svoja prepričanja, veliko raje jim namenimo kak teden pozornosti ali pa še to ne in jih potem gladko pozabimo. Čez več let pa se na njih spomnimo samo še vsake toliko, pa še to samo v “ah un lolek k je pa tok deleč rinu z glavo skoz zid da ga je na koncu pobralo” tonu.

Taki pač smo. Jebat ga.

Only wrote something like 500 words today, it just did not want to flow. Blah, I’m not winning this thing by a long shot and if it goes on like this I won’t even reach my stated goal of 25k words. Fail.

“I am not a sir you insolent fool! I. Am. A. Lady!”

“Sorry g’vnah, we gone call all sirs ‘ere. Ter’bly sorry”

“What a silly habit to have. For myself I would like a cup of tea please and a biscuit perhaps. Yes, a biscuit, that’ll do just nicely!”

“My my, what a posh lady we are … the cookies be yonder. ‘n ye can done put th’ kettle on while men do b’siness”

“Why I never … MOE! Stop laughing and get over here! This buffoon is being a right arse!”

“Sorry dear, it’s just so funny when you put on the whole ‘ooooh, I’m a lady’ routine. You’re wearing trousers for god’s sake and we’re on a cross-country voyage adventure to Von Tropp. I think you’ve stopped being a lady long ago.”

“Yes well … I never intended on being a proper lady. But this gentleman should still treat an unknown girl with some respect.”

“I guess he should, but do we really have time for this nonsense?”

They were at a desolate mechanics station in the middle of nowhere. The place looked like it hasn’t seen any traffic at least since the right screw wars of 1876. There was a run down coal silos, two coal gas pumping stations – the height of technology back then, coal gas, not the pumping – and an old station attendant with barely any teeth left. Looked just as old as the station.

“Just give us a hundred gallons of water and would you per chance have somewhere we could repair our prancer’s leg?”

“Water’s gonna be a problem in this ‘ere desert sir. Mah well done gone dry.”

“But don’t you have some storage somewhere? How does the station run? Surely there must be some water somewhere to run the pumps and push gas around for the lighting systems!”

“Pumps? Lights? We don’t got none o’ those ‘round ‘ere mah friend. Them pumpin’ stations ye see there run on good ol’ elbow grease they do. ‘n lights? Ain’t never even seen me one of those outside a picture book. We use candles ‘n’ torches ‘round ‘ere.”

“Fine we’ve got fuel, what we need is water. What about some tools and a shed then?”

“Well y’all can prob’ly find some wat’r beyond them hills over yonder. Last I r’member there’s a town there. Mayhaps they got themselfs some water.”

“And the shed?”

“I’m sure a young fellow such as yerself ‘s got ‘imself a bunch o’ tools. The shed I ain’t got none fittin’ that there monster o’ yours.”

“I didn’t bring tools. I’ve just got a bunch of stupid bats in the storage compartment”

“Yes, Montgomery did always said ignorance ‘ll be the undoin’ o’ ever’thing we ever fought for dur’ng th’ war. I suppose ye

could find tools in that there shed”

Yesterday somebody shared a cool podcast with me.

Well I should say they tried to, thing is, I didn’t have an iStore account. But whatever, I’ll just make one right? Well … no. That particular podcast is only available in the US due to copyright restrictions or something, or maybe it’s just that most of the store is US only, but whatever. Thing is, I had to make an account and I had to make an American one. Not a Slovene one.

No biggie right, go to the iStore, make an account.

Well no, you can’t choose where you’re from.

So let’s change the language/locale to US and voila, american store. HEY even paypal is available now (yes we’ve got PayPal in Slovenia but Apple is an idiot and doesn’t aknowledge this fact).

Yay, choose paypal, make account. Nope, says I’m not from the US. Fine, I’ll give you my credit card info … well fuck you mister Swizec, credit card says you’re not american. Fail.

This is the process I had to go through to have a valid US Apple ID and iStore account.

1. Find a free App.
2. Download App.
3. Create account
4. Choose without CreditCard (they can’t demand payment info for free downloads, some legal stuff afaik)
5. Enter some US address found on google maps (I used M5 Industries because Mythbusters is made there and I love Mythbusters). Btw this isn’t identity theft because you use your own name.
6. Rejoice, you have a valid US iStore account

Great! I can now download FREE stuff that is, for some strange and utterly absurd reason, only available in the US. Why have region restricted copyright when the content is bloody free is … can anyone explain this at all?

For an utter age now I have been trying to read proper literature more often. There’s a pile of books on my desk, all shiny and new, but unfortunately barely even leafed through. Just waiting patiently and asking me to please give them a read, are they bad books, perhaps they’re too fat? No you’re not fat book honey, I’m just busy.

Two days ago I said, fuck it, this situation needs to be resolved, I used to read a lot, I love reading, so what’s the problem?

As it turns out the problem is that starting is hard, isn’t that always the problem? Beginnings are always hard, sometimes it’s hard even to start going to bed or, hell, start having sex (and I don’t mean when you’re a virgin, I mean on a daily basis). But there was this other problem, I still didn’t have a lot of time.

And so I came up with the concept of 20 minutes a day. Twenty minutes might seem like a lot of time at first, but think about it. 20 minutes is the kind of time you waste walking to school, going to the post office, hell, just waiting for risotto to cook takes around 20 minutes. It’s NOTHING!

Everyone’s got 20 minutes of free time in any given day.

Yeah so everyone’s got twenty minutes, obviously that’s so little time you can’t do anything with it. WRONG! You absolutely positively can do a lot of valuable stuff with that time. For instance you could read ten pages of Dickens, yes Dickens of all things, it reads slow, but in 20 minutes a lot can be done. Or you could devote 20 minutes of unadulterated attention to your children if you’ve got any, or your pets. Or you could spend the 20 minutes getting through your RSS feeds (it’s doable), or do some Pilates like you’ve been wanting to for years.

The thing is you just gotta get off your fucking lazy arse and DO IT! Go on, take 20 minutes out of your busy day and do something for yourself.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything for my Gonzo Steampunk Vampires, which is a shame since this story actually seems to be turning out a lot better than anything I’ve ever written (although it’s still mostly crap) and as a reader of my brain I’m, surprisingly, starting to get a sense that there’s something deeper behind the front tale. That there will be some meat on the bones of this story.

All of this makes me yay!

What does not make me yay is my complete and utter failure at writing. Despite having to write every day I haven’t done anything in so long that today when I wanted to do some writing during a break between lectures I … I … I forgot where my story was. I completely and totally forgot what I was supposed to write!

But in any regard, here are the 724 words I managed to muster today, hope you like ‘em

Moe rushed into class; wet under his nose, shoes pooling with water and the dumbest look on his face ever imaginable. A draft pulled the door from his hand and shut it closed. A deathly quiet filled the lecture hall.

“Hmmmm … yes … when does this class start young master?”

The deep baritone filled his heart with dread and Von Tropp’s professorstache wiggled dreadfully before his eyes.

“Errr …”

“So I thought.” ….. “When we look at the evolution of large cellular organisms we are actually looking at one of the most advanced algorithms in the world. Harnessing the power of true randomness and applying a …”

“Egads, master, are you still standing there? Please. Students are not supposed to be late for their classes and if this is the worth you assign to what I have got to say then please be so kind as to never bother me with your puny presence again.”

“But I … the cold and …”

“Look, it does not matter what the weather conditions are outside or what has suddenly got into you to even consider being so ghastly late as to miss a whole three minutes of my divine knowledge. I used to lecture at the Miskatonic University you know. The least you can do is to show up on time.”

Moe closed the door behind him and plomped his injured ego on a bench in the lobby. How could he let this happen? It was just a stupid wench running into him and he just stood there risking everything he’s ever worked for. For the love of all that is mechanical, what’s gotten into his puny little brain?

He pulled out his sketchbook and started drawing like mad. Work would calm him down. Yes, certainly, some sketching. A module or some design detail. Grand master plan. Yes yes, work! Work is the saviour of all souls! Yessssss. Mwahahahahahahahaha

Scribble scribble.

Rubber.

Scribble.

Sketch sketch.

Think think.

Rubber rubber.

Scribble.

Paper.

Duck.

Scribble scribble.

Rubber.

Pencil.

Paper.

Think.

ONSLAUGHT OF NOISE!

Students were rushing out of lecture rooms all around him and the faculty lobby was soon filled with conversation and chewing and shuffling feet and sandwich wrappers and water fountains and oh gawd the humanity! Moe can’t work like this damn it!

He jumped off the bench. His feet went splosh, but he didn’t notice … coincidentally he also didn’t notice he’d left something behind, but more about that later … perhaps.

Moe fought against the flow of students running away from Von Tropp. He had to show him this. This great leap of innovative reasoning, the great leap of logic nobody has yet managed to do. Finally, he solved it! The idea was made of win!

“Professor Von Tropp!”

“Hmmmm?”

“You’ve got to see this! I’ve finally got her!”

“Got what dear ol’ chap? Been working on that modular automata again have you?”

“The one!”

“So which problem have you found a solution for?”

“What do you mean, which one? THE one!”

“Oh … OH! The idea of self-stabilising tractus apparatus? Everyone thought me mad for even proposing such a thing! Egads, and now you’ve got her!”

“Here, I derived the qua-quocient of the radius and stability of an object as the function of velocity and circular momentum and the solution became obviously apparent, how this wasn’t known for this long is beyond me”

“So how old is she?”

“What? Oh … I came up with it during your lecture, I dunno, something like ten minutes perhaps”

“Errm … young master, I hope her to be incredibly attractive and I wish you the very best. Now for the love of all that is mechanical, stop wasting time with me and with these theories, science can wait, a girl like this happens once in a life time.”

“I don’t …”

“Yes, you wouldn’t would you. Here, take a look at your notes”

There was no physics, no mechanics, no nature inspired automata, no grand unifying theory, no modular designs, not even a hint of anything of any use to anybody …

… there was just a giant heart shape with a pneumograph number in its midst and a bunch of little hearts drawn to look like they were boiling off the big one.

The station attendant spat a big one from the corner of his mouth so it went ding against some scrap metal.

“What’ll ‘t be?”

Last night I watched Grindhouse and even though I fell asleep halfway through I still think this is perhaps one of the biggest film masterpieces I have ever seen.

And actually I just wanted to post this here image as proof, don’t really have much to say, sorry.

Yesterday I was installing a Firefox plugin to facilitate webdevelopment because I was shifting my dev environment from the laptop to the freshly karmic kubuntised desktop computer and guess what I stumbled upon.

The single best thing ever to make its appearance in the Firefox world!

Personas are more than just skins for your firefox, they’re downright fucking sexy … well most of them. Now maybe I’m very far behind the curve here, but the menu entry for Personas does say “New”. And to I haven’t actually seen them anywhere and well, I really don’t know if they’re skins at all. My understanding of a Firefox skin is that it can make an ugly GTK+ like application look MacOS-ish.

Personas, however, go on top of even that. They’re a bit like themes for Google Chrome except I personally find them even sexier. So if you’re using Firefox, go fetch something sexy.

Here are some I’ve tried on for size, but haven’t quite decide which is sexiest yet: