Lorindól

I visited a museum where there you could handle exact replicas of the swords and maces they had on display. The edges were blunt and the short chains they were attached to were bolted to the stone floor, so no one could steal them or do any damage with them.

But if you knelt down, you could get the feel of wielding them in action. One handed sword was really light and even my then 13-year old son could handle the two handed one.

I had read that they weren’t heavy, but I was still very surprised how light they actually were.

It would not hurt to try. Using your phone to record your singing may not be the best idea, the microphone is so small that singing even with normal volume gets the recording easily distorted.

USB-connected microphones are pretty cheap and will perform much better, just hook one to a laptop and use any simple recording software.

And I recommend starting small with children’s songs. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with it’s straightforward ascending and descending melody is a great starter, or at least for me it was.

That is the reason I practiced the first two years in my room at lullaby volume.

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Practice. A lot.

In my teens I wasn’t able to carry a tune at all. Our music teacher marked me as “hopeless” after hearing a me singing a few lines.

This pissed me off royally. I had no desire or illusions of becoming a great singer, but I would not accept being “hopeless”. So I started practicing with simple children’s song melodies and recorded my singing with an old cassette recorder. It was indeed pretty awful at first, but I slowly got better. Then I got my driver’s license and could sing along the songs from the radio and my cassettes while driving alone, it was a big step up from singing quietly in my room.

I also started playing the guitar to get a better understanding of musical theory, which was helpful. After I had learned the basics of playing rhythm guitar firmly I learned to play the piano. I believe that singing the melodies while playing them on the piano was essential to my development, since I could instantly hear if I did not hit the correct note.

By my mid-twenties I could already carry tunes easily and even got a complements about my singing voice. Key changes and modulations were still pretty challenging, but I kept on practising whenever I found the time.

Now in my forties I can repeat a melody correctly after hearing it once or twice and I consider myself a decent singer. I don’t sing karaoke or any solo performances, but I do love singing backup or as part of a group.

If my music teacher hadn’t embarrassed me publicly all those years ago, I most likely would have never put any effort in getting better at singing or learning to play instruments. I started this lifelong project purely out of spite, but it became a major and very dear part of my life. I even owe my marriage to music, while we were still dating my wife confessed to me that she most likely wouldn’t have even noticed me if I hadn’t been playing the guitar at that one summer party. Thankfully I wasn’t too hammered at that time ;)

If these daily numbers are close to correct, Ukraine’s counterartillery capability has increased dramatically in the last weeks. Even with Russias large material reserves those losses are bound to be at unsustainable levels.

I had this before my hearing was damaged in my mid-thirties. I could hear if any electrical device with large filter capasitors was turned on, even from another room. I discovered by accident that the high pitch noise was emitted by the capasitors when I was fixing old audio gear, I guess they vibrate while doing their job or something like that.

I talked about this with my friend who was specializing to be an ear/hearing doctor, his theory was that my upper hearing range was a bit higher than average. He also talked about how brains filter sensory data and it could just be that my filters weren’t blocking these frequencies.

It was also impossible for me to sleep in a room if there were any mosquitoes. The whining of their wings even in the far side of a room was maddening, so I had to kill them all every night before hitting the bed. The one good thing that came out of the damage to my hearing was that the mosquitoes bother me no more, unless they fly right in front of my ears.

Yeah, “Time Enough For Love” ended up on that list mostly because it’s so different. That made an impression on me when I read it in high school, in the way of “Huh, I guess it’s actually possible to write a book like this”. It had a lot of interesting ideas but the narrative sprawls around pretty wildly.

Riftwar Saga basically takes Tolkien’s Middle-earth setting and mixes it with our own world’s Middle age cultures, plus magical stargates and an invasion from an another world. It’s not a ripoff in any way, it carries it own story proudly but the similarities with names from Tolkien’s works was a bit distracting at first. These were the first books I was able to read entirely in original English in my early teens.

There are so many, but here are a few from the top of my head:

The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien.

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Time Enough For Love, Robert A. Heinlein.

Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein.

Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes.

Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri.

Dune, Frank Herbert.

Paradise Lost, John Milton.

Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke.

The Riftwar Saga, Raymond E. Feist.

Jos 1900-luvun lopun RUK-kurssin pioneerikomppanian poikia on uskominen, niin miinakarttojen tarkkuusvaatimukset olivat kyllä ainakin tuolloin aika korkeat. Sen verran kovaa kiroten ne niistä aina puhuivat.

Omassa yksikössäni henkilömiinoitteiden laskeminen käsiteltiin yhden aamupäivän aikana, mutta kyllä meillekin painotettiin kuinka “nämä kaikki sitten kerätään joskus pois, joten merkitsette määrät ja sijainnit karttaan tarkasti”. Ja sitten taisteluharjoituksessa tällä opilla pyyhittiin persettä ja käskettiin iskemään “sakarat hiekkatielle niin saatanan nopeasti kuin vaan mahdollista ja rasti karttaan jälkeenpäin.”

Joten nähtäväksi jäisi, miten tositilanteessa toimittaisiin.

Oh, we have a lot of those. Here’s a few from the top of my head:

Omata lehmän hermot / To have the nerves of a cow (a really calm person).

Lauhkea kuin lammas / As gentle as a sheep.

Viedä kuin pässiä narussa / Being lead around like a ram on a leash. (Stubborn as rams can be, they can be easily made to follow you if you don’t walk in a straight line. You have to make small curves on your way to distract the ram. A metaphor of apparent deception.)

Viekas kuin kettu / Cunning as a fox.

Olla kuin perseeseen ammuttu karhu / To be like bear who’s shot in the ass. (A truly pissed off person.)

Lämpö menee harakoille / The warmth goes to the magpies. (When a window or a door is kept open too long during cold weather.)

Some of you stumbled upon this, yes. But our teachers actually confirmed this crap to us in school, at least mine did.

Yes, or at least there used to be. It was “common knowledge” at least in the 80’s and 90’s, but I don’t think the younger generations really know about that misconception anymore. Which is good.

Ukraine has lots of valuable natural resources, but Russia has much more of everything. The biggest reason for the invasion is most likely that Putin could not let a “brother nation” prosper and drift towards Europe and being a functioning democracy.

Russia’s population might get wild ideas if they saw that their Ukrainian cousins’ standard of living starts to rise rapidly while they have to endure living under a fascist dictator. And substandard and underdeveloped infrastructure, due to the rampant corruption and a government who doesn’t give a shit about the areas outside the larger cities.

Russia and Trump lied ?

Inconceivable!

I fear they won’t. They’ll just try to do the trading in the dark.

Getting cheap energy and tightening Russia’s leash for the same price is just too good deal for China to waste.

Yeah, that map shows the borders of the Soviet Union. It was the first I could find in a hurry, It’s old but helped to prove my point that their landmass east of the Ural mountains is mostly wilderness. Here’s a more up-to-date version that tells the same story:

https://www.geo-ref.net/pdf/russia.pdf

Here is a map showing where the majority of Russia’s population lives:

https://maps-russia.com/maps-russia-geography/russia-population-density-map

The largest part of Russia is the vast Siberia, which is basically just endless forests, mountains and arctic tundra with few cities here and there - and the winters can be extreme. If not for the rich resources and the jobs that extraction of those resources creates, not many would choose to live there.

Yes. Casualties are soldiers who either die in battle or get wounded badly enough to be taken out of action for a longer time.

My electric guitar is a Swedish Hagström Ultra Swede, I always wanted to get a genuine Gibson Les Paul but never could afford one. So I ended up with the much cheaper Ultra Swede, have been playing with it for two years and I’m more than happy with it.

I also have two Finnish Landola acoustic guitars from the late 60’s - early 70’s, a 12-string “Colorado” model and a 6-string “Buffalo”. Both sound excellent, especially after I made new bone nuts and saddles to replace the original plastic ones.