Bacon Hat

I thought that I would wrap the year up with some highlights and lowlights, but in all honesty I might be a bit too lazy for that, so you may have to make do with these funky pictures, depending on how much work I have to do tomorrow. And work a little bit extra I must, for I just spent an oxenload of money (well, the amount of money was not insane, but my budget is tighter than Dream Theater nowadays) on cutlery, a tree and a fancy manbag. But hey, it is your favourite midwinter celebration time, right?


These are the Gense Focus de Luxe, Swedish design from the 1950s and remade in some sort of anniversary edition which can withstand the dishwasher and other elements. Not only are they pretty, they are extraordinarily functional as well, the box informs me, with all design elements filling a purpose. I wonder.


This is my Versace manbag in all its glory. It fits my MacBook Pro, looks snazzy and will make people mistake me for a Russian. All good!


And this is a five foot high tree, sold as a "bonsai" at IKEA, but I dunno, I think it would more correctly be classified as "aggressively pruned little tree". It certainly adds some oomph to my little forest by the window.

There was also Christmas. Not much of a holy-day for me personally, but I donated some money to people in need and got my brother some sci-fi books and perfume. Others insisted on giving me presents, however. In addition to my animal plasters which are sadly not photographed, the highlights were mainly Woodins and a fire extinguisher.


These are Woodins. Woodins are creatures which live in the forest, inspired by Miyazaki's kodama, I believe. My friend Sophie knitted them for me, and I must say it is probably one of the best Christmas gifts I have ever had the honour of receiving!


I also got a black fire extinguisher. It is so hot! Figuratively.


And me, I had a hat made out of bacon. Bacon packages, actually. Which had been in the trash. But this was a while ago, and I learned from it.


PUB, a department store in central Stockholm had the best Christmas decorations ever this year. There were horrorish figures, weirdly proportioned mannequins, dildos and strange moving eyes. Among other things. I have some trouble understanding exactly who was supposed to be tempted into buying stuff, but it was certainly enjoyable.


My friend Ambra got an authentic cocaine jar made a bit less than a hundred years ago or so. A COCAINE jar! I want one, even though I have no cocaine to fill it with.


This is so sweet. Drunk girl kisses animal statue outside Chinese restaurant.


My friend Jonny excelled at... something during the holidays. His girlfriend turned an ashen shade when she saw this outfit, and so did I. Luckily, I managed to snap a picture and even more luckily, he did not look like this when we left the building.


Oh, and happy new year. Try not to drink too much and let us hope the polar bears do not all drown in 2008!

Fleshed Out

Quick update: I decided to give Unreal Tournament 3 another go, and a bit of vehicle CTF was actually pretty fun. However, I could not help but compare it to Battlefield 2, for instance, which is largely similar (except for the objective) and much more satisfying. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what I miss in UT 3, but I think it has to do with the fact that it is so damn similar to its previous incarnations.

I did manage to get my hands on a GeForce 8800 GT card, though. It was mostly by accident, really. They had one left in a local shop, so I thought I would get it and see whether it is as revolutionary (in the price/performance department) as previously claimed. Indeed it was! I could run UT 2003 and Gears of War in 2560x1600 resolution with most settings cranked up to max and still get a smooth frame rate. This card is the bee's knees, so to speak, at least for bees on a budget constraint.

This year, my Christmas (or midwinter, for those so inclined) gifts will be pretty much limited to giving a wad of money to Medecins sans frontieres and telling people that the expected socks are instead vaccine in Darfur. So should yours.

During the last week or so, I have been watching the tv-series Dexter, which has previously been recommended to me on numerous occasions, but I am a busy one, so it took some time before I caught up.

Actually, Dexter is awesome. It is probably one of the best longer tv-series (as in more than fifteen episodes or so) I have ever seen. Sure, there are some fantastic shorter ones, but those are usually more like "a movie which we chopped up into several episodes because nobody would want to see it all in one sitting". Dexter, however, works beautifully as a series and it actually gets better over time, with the second season improving quite a lot over the weaker last half of the first one.

Sure, a tv-series about a serial killer is more or less bound to have a number of implausible events due to the fact that people will expect someone to die in every episode. And indeed they do, they drop like flies. However, all that is entirely secondary to the character development. Dexter's personal life is the main focus of the series, and his emotions feel much more plausible than the cardboard characters usually portrayed on tv. This is one of the weak points though - Dexter's development stands in stark contrast with the other characters in the series who, in comparison, get neither the time or the script to become deeper and more interesting. Dexter is not only the main character, but also the narrator of the series, so it makes perfect sense. I just wish they would have either fleshed out (ahaha, that is my funny bone talking) at least a few other characters a bit more or concentrated even more on Dexter (as in not writing as many scenes or side-stories where he is not present).

Speaking of funny bones, I just realized it has been a while since I read Bone. I should do it again, and so should you.

Korvkatt

The last few weeks have been hectic, to say the least. Not only is there a thesis which badly needs to be submitted. I have also moved, which was a pretty ardous feat considering I had about 70 moving boxes, plus furniture, plus assorted junk, plus tons of clothes. However, I have finally become more or less settled, and everything sure is dandy at the new apartment, save for the fact that my bedroom is apparently next to somebody's constantly crying baby. Pictures soon. Of the apartment, not the baby.

I also tried my hand at the new computer games everyone apparently talks about. Crysis was a major disappointment. It plays sort of like Half-Life 2 and looks sort of the same. The environments, touted as destructible, are rather non-destructible with destructible palm trees bolted on. Wow. Sure, the graphics are nice, as is the sound. However, the game does not essentially play very differently from any other military-style FPS. Except for when you meet the rather dull aliens (the blue ones, that is, the green ones in the ship without gravity are pretty cool), where it instead turns into Quake 4 or something like it.

On the other hand, Gears of War was really nice. It has a sort of arcade feeling to it, where what it lacks in realism is more than made up for by the sheer fun of playing it. The squad based aspect is much more immersive, too, and the level design is better than Crysis, (yes, Gears of War is horribly linear, but it happily admits it) even though the technical quality of the graphics are not.

Unreal Tournament 3 was just like Unreal Tournament 2004 but a bit better looking. I might as well play the freeware game Alien Arena 2007 instead which looks much worse but plays approximately the same. When will they (as in most commercial game developers save for Nintendo) learn that graphics is not the most important factor for the enjoyment of a game?


When I went to Ikea I found plushie insects. Under an expandable child's bed (which I hope was called Procrustes). Some of them eating plushie rats. Looking menacing. It was quite weird. I was actually looking for a "korvkatt" (sausage cat) but they have apparently stopped manufacturing them. Poo.

Current Research

Right, I am now officially homeless. Having left my apartment last week, I have to wait until the end of the month to move into the new one. This sucks. At present, I reside in a dimly lit kitchen in Fruängen, at the southmost end of one of the underground lines. I fret for the move into my new apartment. I have insane amounts of stuff! I thought I might fill twenty or thirty moving boxes (60x45x45 cm or so) but I was surprised to find that I needed close to seventy. Plus my furniture. Plus my clothes. When I move in I will have to have a sorting orgy.

I have been doing other stuff too. I finished reading Jon Courtenay Grimwood's book End of the World Blues, which I really disliked. Like many other books, I chose it because "hey, the cover design is nice!" but unlike most other titles, I had a very hard time getting through it. Funny thing is, it has gotten a lot of very good reviews and I am not even very picky with books. It did get a little bit better towards the end, but not much. This is in stark contrast to 9tail Fox by the same author which I enjoyed. Finally being rid of End of the World Blues, I started on Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated. I have read only a short bit of it, but so far it seems great!

Speaking of great, I went out and bought Super Mario Galaxy, and I think it is possible, if not probable, that this is one of the best single-player games ever. I have only played for three hours or so, so it might still be marred by being too short or too repetitive, but what I saw left my jaw drooping. I also got The Orange Box, just to be able to play Team Fortress 2. It is certainly a good game, but it would so be much better if it was not so immensely addictive. Together with a friend of mine, I am creating a game which is sort of a mix between Team Fortress and the first Grand Theft Auto. That is, top-down 2d capture the flag action. Most of the programming is done, so now we just need to implement gameplay restrictions and give it fancy graphics. It will have pirates, and zombies. Look forward to it.

As you can see below, I am also partying TO THE MAX! My friend Anton was just partying TO THE MED, given his relative lack of party hats. On the same day as the above picture was taken, there was a hobo on the underground who was spraying pine-scented ass freshener (the stuff some people have in their bathrooms instead of good ventilation) into his mouth so that the whole wagon stank like a synthetic forest. That is probably the epitome of partying TO THE MIN.

Drive-by Shootings

Some of these were taken from a car, which posed a bit of a problem. Most of the good pictures, composition-wise, were too blurry to be useful. Some of them turned out really nice, though, especially since people generally stay unaware of a photographer passing in a car. I know one of these people, though.

Ugly (Yet Delicious!) Food

I make my own food most of the time, generally because the pre-made solutions, save for those from unreasonably expensive restaurants, are way too often icky. However, while I am extremely picky with the aesthetics of other things, like my clothes, my apartment, my friends... I care not at all about how the food looks, as long as it tastes good and does not contain nasty shit.

This is just a close-up of my brie, penne rigate, soy sausage and dark bread dish. I never knew brie looked so revolting! Well, it is mold, so it should not exactly be surprising.

I have never felt more American than when I made this last week. It is a garlic baguette. Covered in mozarella cheese! Mmm... It took its toll, though, after eating it I almost felt like puking from all the fat.

This was supposed to be a chocolate cake. Unluckily, we improvised a little regarding the recipe, so it turned out to become the largest chocolate donut I have ever eaten, and it looked like a turd. Good going!

This was great! Mashed potatoes with some cheese and pepper mixed in, together with chanterelles, carrots and soy sausages. The stuff in the picture is the leftovers, it looked better at dinner.

Speaking of Music

In some small way, music is like drugs to me. We have all heard that comparison before, I guess (or any combination X is like Y where X and Y could represent love, religion, music, drugs and a number of other things dear to some people), but it was not until I stopped using my iPod (or any other portable music device) on a daily basis that I realized how much it has generally been clouding my thinking.

I am not talking about listening to music in the background at home here, but rather listening to music in the foreground while walking or commuting. Suddenly, I think a lot more, and I think way better while walking than while staring at a computer screen. And most importantly, I come up with new (and actually listenable) music myself, something which I find impossible to do indoors unless I have had at least a bottle of wine and in the latter case the music in question is not listenable when I have sobered up.

So, this evening I will be sitting on a cold and possibly somewhat damp bench in a park close to my home, composing a new song.




In other news, I scanned some of the other old pictures I found. They are as interesting as the others - especially the profile with the purple lipstick. I cannot for the life of me understand what the crew were thinking, but it certainly is a great memento to show the grandchildren.

I was pretty upset today by a debate article in Svenska Dagbladet, one of the largest "real" (as in not only concerned with tv-shows and insane and/or nude celebrities) newspapers in Sweden. Not only was it written by Jan Myrdal, one of the Swedish left's least likable people in my humble opinion, due to his love for dictators and massacres worldwide, but it was also the single worst argument for not allowing same-sex marriages. Disregarding the classic "Think of the children" argument which I can actually see myself sympathizing with to some extent (as long as there is scientific proof to back it up), it was all a rambling tirade of gibberish which only serves to affirm my animosity towards Mr Myrdal. Nowhere did he manage to convey a good reason that homosexuals should not be allowed to marry.

Being neither a homosexual (because of laziness, I use the term here to describe all the various forms of non-heteresexual people who are sexually attracted to consenting adults), nor a hater of homosexuals, I have not had the energy necessary to get a deeper understanding the whole gay debate or the mechanics behind it. My main problem is understanding what the problem is. As long as we disregard the question of having children and discuss only consenting adults (as well as assinine ideas such as trying to force religious institutions to marry homosexuals even though it is against their tenets!), I have never seen a good reason to not allow homosexuals to do the same thing heterosexuals do. Well, gay men usually have abysmal taste in music, but apart from that, they are generally like everybody else. The previous sentence might be illegal under Swedish law.

Speaking of music! I have started digging classical music again. It has been ages. I used to love Dvorak, Prokofiev, Debussy, Bach and many others, but I realized when I accidentally put a (J.S.) Bach mp3 on my phone that I have hardly listened to any in... five years or so. No more of that bereavement, though!

Green Glowing Jesus

Another weekend and another movie. This time I saw Ratatouille and was extremely pleasantly surprised! Granted, it followed all the rules of cheesy (ahaha, I made a funny) childrens' films, but it did so while being fab both visually and storywise. Actually, it is probably the most beautiful 3d-rendered movie ever, though it cannot measure up to the most beautiful 2d work. As long as you are ok with all the overt moral pointers and the completely hackneyed sort of cartoon romance, it is one of the few must-sees of 2007.

I had the weirdest dreams again. I think the initial setting was that I would go away for a weekend trip to London (which I am actually planning to do in a few weeks) and just hang around. However, my time in London was brief, and I found myself instead in a very small country called Rowenia or somesuch. It revolved around a large brick building, which I believe was an old boarding school or customs station. Together with my travel companion, I speculated in the origins of the country, and how it could just as well have been a part of a larger country such as France.

The architecture seemed western Mediterranean enough, and a dead giveaway was that the soldiers spoke French, which led to me having a problem communicating with them. As we took in the sight of the large brick building under an overcast sky, I noticed that a rather large and lively stream with lots of bends ran next to it on one side, which actually lapped the building walls. I said aloud that I wondered how on earth the building was holding against the forces of nature like that, and my companion replied that there was most likely an ongoing process of building and destruction. In some places the wall looked new, and in others you could see the mortar crumbling and falling out from between the bricks.

We continued our tour through the small country, and found ourselves walking over some sort of bridge resembling a drawbridge, where there was a sloped, broad street between some houses which could as well have appeared in Kiki's Delivery Service. Visby-esque, that is. Suddenly, we were ushered away from the middle of the street, as there was apparently going to be a parade. The French-speaking soldiers did their best to communicate with me, but I could not understand their requests. Then a woman appeared, who was quite apparently trying to get it on with me. It went badly, to say the least, as she suddenly accused me of having spit on the back of her neck. I took a look, and sure enough, there was some foamy, slimy liquid there. I told her it must have come from the sky, even though I was not sure whether I had accidentally spit on her while speaking.

The resolution to the situation eludes me, as I was suddenly at least twenty years older and on my way home from this weekend trip, which, it was stressed, lasted from Friday to Sunday. Friday to Sunday. Friday to Sunday. I had a beard which was starting to grey and a big black bag of some sort. I got on a bus down by Stadsgårdskajen in Stockholm but when it arrived at my stop, the bus just passed it by, despite my cries of frustration aimed at the bus driver. My bag also got stuck between the seats, so it was a few more stops before I could get off, next to a motorway. Defying death, I ran over it to catch the next bus in the opposite direction.

The sky was still overcast, and there were no people about, just cars, even though this was just a small grassy knoll in the middle of a city. I started walking in the direction of the bus I wanted to take, just to see it pass me by. I started running, very fast indeed, and the scene changed to one where I think I ran along Strandvägen, from Dramaten towards Djurgården. There was water on one side of the road, at least. I recall the bus being number 55, and I actually managed to race past it to a bus stop where I stood, panting, waiting for the bus to stop to pick me up. However, to my dismay, only bus 51 stopped at this location, and the bus driver just gazed my way with a very sad and distant look. During my whole run, an icon depicting Jesus, in the Russian style, laid in the water, slightly submerged, glowing with a greenish sheen.

Then I woke up.

The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands

I saw Stardust the other day. It has been a while since I read anything about Neil Gaiman, and ages since I read Stardust, which I recall being a very good book, though not on par with Anansi Boys, American Gods or Good Omens. Watching the movie, I started remembering bits and pieces, but not enough to say whether it was accurate or not. Not that I usually care too much about a movie following the source, except in blatant cases such as Constantine. What bollocks. I love Hellblazer, but I could not even watch the movie. Anyway, Stardust was a perfect cozy feelgood film.

Also, I finished Sputnik Sweetheart, and though the ending was the typical Murakami thing where a lot of plot threads are just dropped, the book as a whole was very good, and rather different from his other books in that it was much more concise and to the point, for good and for bad. Still, I mostly wish I could read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle for the first time again.

My life for once: I move out in just a few weeks. It feels very strange to leave my home of five years, but I suspect that I will be pretty happy once I settle in in my new apartment, with its pretty balcony. The dark cloud on my winter sky will be my thesis, which is still nowhere near finished. Damn you, thesis! Oh, and I have enrolled in a one semester geology/astronomy course. The Devil finds work for idle hands, you know.




Also, I found a lot of pictures from almost a decade ago, when I used to do modelling work for various magazines and designers. In hindsight, I did look pretty silly, and I cannot understand why they coloured my hair pink like that. It was a pretty fun job at the time, though. More pictures coming soon!

Visiting the Dolphin Hotel

So I had the weirdest dream tonight. Yesterday evening, I was sitting at home in my sofa with a bit of a cold, reading Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. Without spoiling too much of the book, the Dolphin Hotel makes an appearance in this book, just as it does in Dance, Dance, Dance. The funny thing is that the protagonist in the latter book has dreams about the hotel. So did I.

The setting was a large, run-down hotel, which in my dream changed as I walked through it. There were corridors that disappeared when I turned my back as well as wallpapers that changed their colours between various drab pastels. I especially remember taking the elevator as high as it would go, floor eight, in search of my room. I was, for some reason, carrying a lot of bread and vegetables, wearing only slacks. I then took the stairs to floor nine, where there was only a large wooden panel at the top of the stairs. Realizing I could open it, there was another door behind it, which I dared not enter. Instead I went down to the lobby where a tall, blonde man greeted me, speaking softly in a German far too fast for me to follow. I indicated that I did not really comprehend his wishes. He then switched to English and gave me two tarot decks. The cards were identical, save for their size. One deck was much larger than the other. I proceeded to pull out one of my own, a design called Basic Tarot (which I actually own in real life, because I at one point in time thought the cards looked nice for some reason). Having looked at the decks he gave me, I queried him as to why he had not given me Crowley's Thoth tarot instead, and that I would have preferred the edition with three different versions of The Emperor. He then gave me a very strange look.

There was also much ado about some glassed-in area in the centre of the hotel, but I cannot for the life of me remember exactly what it was about, except for the fact that the hotel's owner looked like Chuck Norris.

In the non-dream world, I have been playing some games due to my convalescence. World in Conflict is quite nice. The graphics are good, the story is more or less plausible and the explosions are, for lack of a more subtle description, gratifying. My first impression of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, however, is crap. It is just like Battlefield 2 except it is no fun. Maybe I cannot grasp the mechanics, maybe I am not in its target group. I dunno.

Life in the Macro Lane

My new Tamron 90mm 2.8 is a very, very fun beast to play around with. Not that I have the slightest idea about how to shoot properly with a macro lens, but since I am quite happy, that can wait. Meanwhile, I am looking to find a cheap ring flash. Not that the results are especially pretty, but apart from looking cool in themselves, ring flashes bring desperation and hopelessness out of any motif you could think of. A bit like Tolkien's ring, actually. And therefore, my precious!

(Please note that I never even bothered to read the Lord of the Rings books, and I only saw two of the movies.)

I started playing the new Company of Heroes game, Opposing Fronts, and found it to be... exactly the same. I was just a little bit disappointed. Especially since the Germans sound like people trying to fake a German accent while being slightly retarded. I guess I should give it a few more missions before being disappointed. However, my hopes for World in Conflict, which I acquired today, are much higher.

This last Sunday, I went to Hötorget to shop used books for silly low prices. I have found some very nice literature there at times, and this day was not an exception. I got a big book about the churches in Copenhagen, complete with illustrations of various details and there was this Polish book about European art in Polish collections, from before the war if I remember correctly.

War-knitting

It has been quite a while, but my business has been great. Apart from having a full-time job, I have also been working quite a lot on my thesis and searching for an apartment. The latter task, I am happy to say, is finished. I found a very nice two-room apartment in central Stockholm, in a house built in the late 1920s. It has a fireplace, a balcony and is damn nice. The problem, as expected, is that it will cost me a bloody fortune to live there.


Somebody has knitted here. I have no idea whether they made the whole thing right there, or if only the finishing touches were made at the site.


This is probably one of the best pictures I have ever taken. I am sure you will agree.


When taking a walk with a friend, I found this nice plank. It says "WE WALK SLOWLY" and I have no idea what it means.


Yes, I have been drinking again, as is painfully apparent.

I found The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to be the best Murakami book as of yet. Not only was it rock-solid through the whole story, but it also had an ending I did not dislike. I also read Hard-Boiled Wonderland, but it was really nowhere near as good. A Wild Sheep Chase which I am reading at present seems to be more like the former, which makes me pretty happy.

I took a pause in my Murakami marathon these last few days to read the latest Terry Pratchett book, Making Money. I found it to be very easy to read, but a little bit shallow. Of course, we are talking Pratchett here, and his books always tend to be rather shallow, but in a good way. Lots of archtypes and a few real characters, simple but effective stories, wonderful to read. It is not exactly a wonder why Homer (or whoever wrote those books) is such a famous guy. However, Making Money was somehow a little bit more shallow than usual. Only the main protagonist is given any character at all. Everybody else is just a cardboard cutout. Still a very good read, but I would have expected a wee bit more.

Today, I was a bit ambitious and went to Kulturhuset where I ambled around for a bit and looked at Martin Parr and Nobuyoshi Araki photo exhibitions. Parr was rather interesting. No fantastic pictures, no great art as such. However, he seems to be very gifted when it comes to capturing the spirit of a time and/or place, which sometimes counts for a lot more than the perfect composition. Araki seemed to like women who are tied up and have plastic lizards stuffed up their reproductive organs. It was a little silly, but there were some fantastic pictures of flowers and his beloved cat which made me forgive the rather tedious bondage bits.

A friend, a flower, a wild strawberry

Hey, I am all grown up, bitter and artsy. Since I have a camera, everything must now be in black and white. Also, I am honestly trying to learn to like jazz of the Bix Beiderbecke kind, but it is not going too well. I always switch to VNV Nation or Einstürzende Neubauten after five minutes.

I found a friend, a flower, a wild strawberry (which was not so wild since it grew on a balcony, so I would call it a tame strawberry, but then I would have a hard time conveying the fact that it is one of those small strawberries, Fragaria vesca, which we Swedes call smultron), a sunglasses-wearing child in a church holding a fish in front of the altar (oh, the symbolism) and a big clay butt next to flowers.







I also found I could fry some Quorn in lots of Kikkoman soy and white rice vinegar, add various vegetables and then throw in a bunch of udon noodles. Needless to say, this is a damn tasty dish which I fear I may get tired of very soon if I continue to make it all the time.

I also finished reading Dance Dance Dance which I felt was strangely familiar at times, I cannot really place it, but it was very much like some other book I read a long time ago. It also bore a passing resemblance to Lolita, which is not a bad thing. All in all I liked Kafka on the Shore a bit better, though. Of course, I have already started on my next Murakami book - The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - which hitherto is decidly better than both of the above. That might change though. The ending is so often the crucial part. The funny thing is that The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is certainly feeling eerily pertinent right now.

Dance Dance Dance

So I got the result from my final exam back yesterday, and it was positive enough. A pass, nothing more, but it still means I only have to finish my thesis now, and I will officially be a Master of Science. I like that title - it reminds me of He-Man.


Also, despite my recent horrible experiences with all things electronic but perhaps because of my sour mood caused by my recent break-up among other things, I decided to spend all my remaining cash on a Canon EOS 400D. I had the previous model in the series, the 350D, some time back, but was forced to sell it as I was a bit shorter on cash than I liked. Anyway, I got a 50mm 1.8 lens of questionable build quality which takes great pictures, a decent flash, a 55-200mm zoom and some other stuff, so now I will spend my days trying to freeze the sky. As above.


I also bought this fabulous white shirt with black cuffs, collar and buttons. It is very, very nice, and I wonder why I have never made one like that. Yesterday, I read a bit more than half of Murakami's Dance Dance Dance, which was fantastic until about where I am now, but now it is not more than great. Still great, mind you, but I guess my expectations are far too high for the poor Mr. Murakami to be able to deliver all the time.

BioShit

For the first time in ages, since I mostly play Wii and simple web games, I was actually considering going to the store to shell out for a PC game, BioShock in this case, which looks absolutely fantabulous. I had my €45 ready and willing for the Swedish launch tomorrow - and then I learned that this (offline!) game requires online activation. Do these people understand nothing? The crackers will crack, the couriers will cour (?), the "Scene" will be lit with industrial light and magic with the result that everyone will be downloading it via BitTorrent within a week, anyway. The only thing that sort of practice does is put people off from buying BioShock. Pity. It seems to be great fun, and I liked the randian slant to the game. Some Half-Life game I got quite a while ago will stay my latest acquisition for some time to come, I guess.

In other news, I am nowadays utterly girlfriend-less, so I went to a bookstore and got Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Dance Dance Dance (I just picked them randomly from the books available). All by Haruki Murakami, whose writing I simply love. Equally randomly, I decided to start with Dance Dance Dance. Hitherto, it seems as great as I expected it to be.

I have recently been reading quite a lot of books, and this - combined with a very strange semi-hallucinatory awakening this morning within which I had the main theme of a story presented to me by myself to the tones of Last Train to Trancentral - led me to feel the uncontrollable urge to start sketching the rough outlines of a short story myself. I have no idea whether it will just end up in the trash like all my other attempts at writing, but this is the first time I have actually been able to develop the protagonist (or antagonist, as it were) to an extent with which I am satisfied.

She's in Parties

Apart from crying over all my electronic apparel going haywire for no good reason - the holy electronic udder having exploded in my face as I suckled its flame-retardant teats, as it were - I have been to parties. Some are good, and some are not.

Yesterday held one of the former in store. Sorry about the picture quality - another feature of the P1i phone of course. The party started innocently enough, but it might have been the ouzo and the gyoza I brought with me, like a harbinger of wailing doom, that made everyone rummage through the wardrobes to find all sorts of fancy dress. We also destroyed three bananas, did the Benny Hill dance several times and tried vacuuming everything we could reach, including a mouth.