Current mood: Emos suck.

It’s been ages since I blogged, isn’t it? I’m sorry. :P If I have troubles keeping up with my comic you can imagine the blog comes in far behind.

But today I feel like talking about something. As you probably all know, I am the proud owner of two budgerigars (Also known as parakeets). They’re called Bud and Pat and they kick ass. Bud is a female, Pat is PRESUMED to be a male. He’s too young to be 100% sure yet but his cere stays a good blue thus far. While I can’t do everything some bird owners can do with them, I consider them 100% tamed. They are loving and nice, they adore playing with everyone in the household. We’re like a giant toy to them. They’re fighting together sometimes of course but nothing dramatic. I punish them when I have to. And oh - they have their wings clipped.

OH NO! CLIPPED WINGS! WHAT A HEARTLESS BITCH I AM!

Actually I’m being responsible, you hippie animal lovers. I’m quite sick of going all around budgie websites and seeing some know it all motherfuckers think I am a cruel mean against nature owner because I decide to take control over my birds’ flight. These people just walk around saying that chopping the flight feathers of a bird is awful because a bird is meant to fly free.

Maybe they should open the door to their house then and leave them out; holding a bird ostage in a household is quite against their nature as well. These wings are designed to fly outside. But why don’t they do that? OH YEA! Cuz a bird born captive CANNOT SURVIVE IN THE WILD. So let’s see, how cruel am I? I clip their wing so that way I’m sure they stay within the household. They cannot fly outside if a guest comes in all of a sudden.
Oh I know what they’ll say:”You’re supposed to make SURE that your bird cannot escape outside! It’s your responsibility and you cannot restrict a bird by cutting its wings just for that!” MEEP. Wrong. I do it without shame and there’s a simple reason to that: I am human. ACCIDENTS HAPPEN. They happen very often. We did have a bird once without clipped wings. Someone didn’t knock, and the bird was gone. Whoops. I paid 17 bucks each for my budgerigars. I want to keep them. And to keep them I’ll make SURE they cannot just fly outside the window. I 100% admit this: I restrict my birds’s freedom. I restrict their freedom because they are MY PETS. And even then: cutting their wings don’t even stop them from doing whatever the hell they want in my house. The cage door is always open and they aren’t shy to get out of it and hop happily around while singing nice bird songs.

So to you overzealous bird lovers out there that believe I am a cruel monster: fuck you. You are hypocrites. You already restrict their freedom by locking them away from sunshine, and you would be DEVASTATED if a bird of yours flew away. You give them their wingspan but you give it to them so they can do what YOU want and not what THEY want. You do it cuz it makes YOU feel good and nice and not cruel and all that kind of shit. THEY would want to go outside. YOU want them to entertain you. If it entertains you to keep their wings intact and you are willing to live with the risk of them flying outside, go nuts, they are yours. But don’t go around bullshitting me.

It’s been a long time since I posted here, and I will brew a long post, but I have a few questions first. They are very important, and I’d like you all to help me answer them. My soul must be at peace.

• Why does ANYONE want to see Lan and Megaman have a hot incest relationship?
• Why does ANYONE think that Protoman and Megaman are so hot for each other?
• Why does ANYONE think that Lan and Chaud are made for each other?
• WHY IS EBAY HURTING MY BRAIN?!

Discuss.

BONUS QUESTION (Gives you 2 points!)! Is Megaman.EXE Kate’s long lost evil twin?!

Now the comet is pretty much gone in the south as well… But what a SHOW it was, ladies and gentlemen! This was, by far, the comet with the most extravagent tail I have ever seen. HECK! Just look at today’s gorgeous Astronomy Picture of the Day!

Oh, if you guys don’t know that website yet… Each day they display a kickass astronomy picture and explain it. If you want to see fancies, that’s the place to go. It’s the first thing I check in the morning, and I do it even before my email!

This will be a short post… But I have NO idea why I didn’t write about this sooner. Perhaps I was too busy trying to spot the fucking thing… And I failed. Here here, let me talk to you about this KICKASS thingie named comet McNaught.

Frankly, I thing I never heard of it until it started brightening and becoming good looking. And when it did, the weather around here got immediately shitty. Of course, if I want to see something, BLOCK IT FROM MY VIEW with stupid clouds! Heck, if I’m not mistaken, it’s 2nd brightest to Ikeya-Seki (1965), the brightest comet recorded since 1935! And guess what?

This thing. Was visible. In broad. DAYLIGHT.

I tried to get a view of it in daylight, but I failed. It seems like there was a slight haze in the skies and this was enough to block the comet. I could’ve seen it if I would’ve taken out of the binocs, but when it comes to searching around the Sun for a comet, I’m a bit of a pussy. I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy the idea of being blind. With your bare eyes it’s OK since you’re not supposed to look at the Sun, you’re supposed to look close to it… Plus, it’s very very very rare you’ll get permanent damage or any at all from looking directly at the Sun for a long time in normal conditions, but it’s still a bad idea to try it. Exception on solar eclipses. THAT is BAD for your eyes. Imagine yourself enjoying totality without protection. Your eyes are used to the dark, your pupils are wide open. And then suddenly, that Moon bitch steps out of the way. What do you get? You get a slight bit of sunlight hitting you directly in your unaware eyes. Oops.

So yes, under normal conditions your eyes are gonna fight the Sun wildly. Your eyes will cringe, your pupils will narrow and dart left and right by reflex. You’ll have a glare in your eyes for a few minutes but it’ll recover. But with binoculars?? Heck, we had fun as kids by burning ants with a magnifier, what the hell would BINOCS do to your sight?? So fuck it, I’m not getting close to the sun with ‘em! (Unless I do solar projection, then I do. Did you ever try it? Next time there’s a big sunspot on the Sun, try it. It’s really fun and an easy way to observe the surface of the sun.)

Comet McNaught was first visible at sunset for us. It was hard to catch if you had stuff in the way on the western horizon. Like… me. There are woods in that direction, and lots of houses. Add a constant rate of clouds in the west, and well, I missed it. Totally. When it came bright enough for daytime viewing, I couldn’t do it either like I explained above. Now, it’s visible only in the southern hemisphere. And heck, it’s GORGEOUS. It’s about 50 times better looking than what we had! It did a tight turn across the sun and you see clearly the curved track of dust it left during that. It’s KICKASS.

I wish I was in the southern hemisphere.

I’ve been told this one time too many.

Today I was having a little religious chat with someone. Nothing big, we were talking about being overly tolerant to religious minorities at first. (He wasn’t making a big deal out of it like a couple assholes in the last blog post. I was glad to see most of you had common sense though.) Then we started slipping towards something more general. Regular Science vs Bible stuff that isn’t quite worth mentioning. Then at the end of our convo, he said what I hate to hear:

“Your existence must be pretty bleak if you don’t believe in God and an afterlife.”

Bleak? My existence? That’s something you often hear here and there. That God is Hope! God is great! We’re all going to a better place when we die! (But not you. And not you. And not you. You all go to Hell cuz you don’t believe in our Lord.) I let the guy get away with it, but then I sat back for a few minutes and thought about it carefully.

The universe I live in is visually infinite (If not literally). I’m sitting here, in a building on a tiny tiny planet, 149,600,000 km away from a far bigger ball of fire named the Sun. A speck of dust in that wide universe. The Sun is humongous, a million kilometers wide, and is hellish hot. It throws billions of tons of gas in space from gigantic explosions, and some of these clouds travels to our planet. And when it reaches us, the night skies light up in a glorious veil of colors. The Sun lives for billions of years, and when it’ll be out of hydrogen, it will puff up, engluff our homes and later expell its shell of gas to become a graceful white dwarf and planetary nebula. As awesome as the Sun is, it is a tiny tiny star. There are far bigger ones out there. One example could be the Pistol Star. It is a hundred times wider than our star, but lives a far shorter life. In a few million years only, it will be out of hydrogen and explode in a spectacular light show. Its core will collapse and most likely become a black hole, though it could become a neutron star (Maybe even a magnetar!). Black holes are a monster, a beast from which even light isn’t fast enough to escape.

Yet they all started the same way. One day there was a nebula, a humongous cloud of gas that is light years wide which sometimes shines in the darkness with gorgeous colors thanks to nearby stars. The gas collapsed, and slowly became a star. The dust in the disk around it started to collide. Dust by dust the pieces grew bigger and kept colliding until nearly everything was gone. They became asteroids. Or Comets. Some became huge balls of gas, some became huge balls of rock. We call these comets by tradition, though it doesn’t mean much. And now, thanks to Nature’s complex design of evolution, there is life on one of these planets. It is us. And we grew. We gazed up at the stars and seen its wonders. We started to understand them. We calculated their motions, their status, their properties. Some of us KILLED others because of their knowledge disagreeing with their belief. But it never stopped science from spliting fact from fiction. Truth has surfaced: the Universe is grandiose, took billions of years to grow, and we’re part of it. We were born here through biology, we grew, we lived, and we died to allow new organisms to sprout and feed from our corpses.

Who’s existence is bleak, I wonder? Those who believe a guy simply snapped his fingers and voilà he had toys to play with, or those who knows the universe deserves far more credit? I witnessed the Universe in all its glory. I don’t need child stories to explain it or an afterlife.