Old Remix of Mine

In the absence of any irritating formalities I might have missed, I am officially finished with school, forever! Now I just have to wait a bit for the school to check that everything is in order and award me my master's degree. Yay!

In other news, I have a new job. Instead of working with budgets and invoicing and graphic design I will start out as a regression monkey within health consulting. I get to play around in Stata and Excel all day and maybe publish some papers.

And if you have Spotify, I just found an old remix of mine there. Give it a listen.

Eggs

Ah, friends! Like watching the telly but you have to talk to them.

On another note, Weeds is still good. I am watching season four now and still not tired of it. Anxious to find out how the third season of Dexter ends. Want another season of Sons of Anarchy, great series.

Two eggs.

Angry, Bricked-in

I had sort of an Edgar Allan Poe moment. Recently, I found a rather unusual black cat ornament that my ex-girlfriend had given me at the local charity store to which I have given a lot of clothes and other stuff over the years. I remembered how I had been quite uncertain whether to donate that particular cat ornament or not, what with fond memories and yadda yadda. Anyway, seeing it again made me a bit sad and quite wistful, so I quickly left the story. This was a week or two ago. Today, I was up in the attic rummaging about... and found it there.

So, either there are two identical and very unusual cat ornaments within a very small area, or this is something like that angry, bricked-in cat of Poe fame.

The cat in the picture above, however, is doing just fine. I had to cut the hair in her armpits today, though, as it was turning into dreadlocks, and that is not particularly good for cats.

Invasion of the Gay Garden Gnomes

I was hanging out with this beast. Her favourite pastime is reaching high ground and screaming.


Also, WTF of the week. The gay garden gnomes. They had lesbian ones too, equally mind-bendingly ugly, as garden gnomes often are. I just got myself a little bonsai tree.


Yet we stay happy, content and well-nourished.


But some have been gazing for too long into the abyss.

Anyway.

It was just as I feared. Number9dream was one of those great books which begin to dissolve towards the end, like grains of kitty litter in the shower, or, er, not quite perhaps. Anyway. The book was great but it just sort of unravelled infuriatingly towards the end like a roll of kitchen paper falling down from the counter and exploring all of the floor.

However, Cloud Atlas by the same author, David Mitchell, is hitherto fantastic. If I had it in me to write books, one of them would have been something like this - the concept, not the particular environments and situations. I even had one loosely planned. Now I can spend my time some other way. No games right now though. Dawn of War - Soulstorm and Red Alert 3 were both big mehs. Meh.

Jinx

Quick note from the posh part of town. In the local supermarket, by the cashier, there was a small note that asked the customer to please, please, do not use your black Amex in the credit card terminal swipe thingy, because it apparently fucks the payment system up beyond recognition (how this happens is beyond me). This is awesome, I want an Amex Jinx card like that, spreading chaos and destruction like wildfire everywhere I go.

How the West was Lost

The Swedish right-wing government (which I made the grand mistake of voting for, next time I might as well vote for Godzilla) has decided that giving some people the right to play police is a great idea. This is called IPRED. We are not talking about guards or bouncers or anything. No, the music and film industries. Through handing a court "proof" (a screenshot saying "person X is downloading file Y") of copyright infringement (often referred to as "theft" because it sounds much worse) the enterprising industry representative can obtain the IP address of a supposed copyright infringer (often referred to as a "pirate" because it sounds like they plunder, rape and kill people) from an ISP. No police involved, no real investigation, no demand for actual proof. The industry representative can then send extortion letters to the supposed copyright infringer, just like they already do in many countries all over the world. The person might be guilty or innocent (victim of a hacker, another family member did it, the industry representative made a mistake/doctored the "evidence"), but that need not matter. If the industry representative sets the extortion amount just right, it will be comparatively financially preferable for the supposed copyright infringer to pay up, given the risk of high lawyer costs and great expenditure of time otherwise.

This is insane.

More subtly, this can be used by someone who wishes to find out the identity of someone else on the Internet. Simply pose as an industry representative (or find a real one to do the work for you) and doctor some evidence. Voila! You get their personal information, social security number and what not.

This is insane.

Combined with the FRA law which is perverse, sickening and fascist, I am wondering exactly what the fucking hell these politicians are aiming for. Are they evil or stupid? Which is worse?

The "reasoning" behind IPRED is that the poor authors need to be given adequate compensation for their work. Bullshit. It is another way to completely erode privacy and put power in the hand of not only private corporations, but the most meaningless of all private corporations, bringing such deadweight losses to society that they could sink small islands.

Though, the justification for the FRA law was even worse. It was passed because TERRORISM might otherwise be all over us like a burning poison blanket over a puppy dog with a limp, and thus we must be the vanguard of draconian oppression. Never mind that Sweden has been the victim of terrorism... never. You could argue about the event when the ship Amalthea was bombed in 1908 by anarchists, killing a grand total of one person, though, but that hardly seems like a good reason for a thoroughly horrible panopticon law a century later.


I have never been a foaming-at-the-mouth patriot, but I have always liked my country. Now I am mostly just ashamed.

State of the Union on the Far Side of the Sea

Some political commentary: I believe Obama winning might have been good. Not necessarily because he is a better person with better politics than McCain. I know too little to comment on that, except that I believe his protectionist ideas suck. Since Obama is a supporter of the death penalty, I am sad to say that I still cannot see the US as a civilized country (that goes for you too, Japan!). Civilized countries do not kill their citizens. Especially not citizens like Timothy McVeigh who might well have been withholding important information that could, perhaps, have been extracted at a later date. Oh, and the innocent, you should not execute the innocent.

China having the death penalty I can understand, the country is slowly developing into an industrialized superpower, but you cannot change the mentality of the people, or the rulers, in just a few years. The US is another story, having reintroduced a death penalty once abolished, torturing prisoners, letting cults have a field day (and field decades), et cetera. However, I hope the regression into barbarism will stop soon, preferably with Obama.

What is the deal with Obama constantly being referred to as "black", by the way? If he has a white mother, how can he be black? Are blacks somehow a genetically dominant race, much like brown eyes? Either way I think it could be a very good thing that the president is not always a white male. I actually did some sort of test online at Harvard University a while ago, to see if I was a bit of a racist without knowing it. It turned out I had no preference at all between white people and black people (not sexual preference, that is, just some general sort of preferencishness). Yay for me, I guess. I also did the test with obese versus normal people. I apparently had a very strong preference for normal people as compared to obese. And I had no preference between heterosexuals and homosexuals. No surprises there. Really fat people should diet to avoid diabetes and oozing over into my seat on the bus. Gay people should be happy just like the rest of us. The test took some time to do, so I will do Indians (I guess that means native Americans) versus white people at some later date.

Speaking of gay people the proposition 8 thing in California sucked. Why should group A tell members of group B how to marry when the people in group A are generally not interested in marrying people in group B, anyway. Opposing gay marriage is just medieval, though I should point out that opposing gay people adopting kids is not necessarily so, given the various foo and bar reasons for accepting it or not. I know too little about the latter issue to have an opinion.

Speaking of gay issues, I find it so stupid that the state should subsidize people who want to "change" genders (and it happens here in Sweden - I guess having the world's second highest taxes means the government needs to find lots of stuff to do with all that money). I have had long discussions with gay (or trans or whatever the correct term is) rights people about this, but nobody has managed to convince me that a completely voluntary plastic surgery to alter your looks should be paid for by the rest of the people. Come on, there are millions of other people who do not particularly like the bodies they were born with, either, and most of them make do anyway. Use your own money.

Octopus Angel

It is now hat season!


The Max Ernst exhibition at Moderna Museet was great. My prior knowledge of his art was close to zero, but I really, really enjoyed all the beautiful underwater-ish paintings in blues and greens. If Giger's work had been enjoyable, it might have looked something like that. And L'ange du foyer, which I have seen before, but never in person. It was utterly fantastic. The sculpture above is his creation. Security stopped me from taking more pictures, even though we were not inside the exhibition itself.

I also saw a Lars Lerin exhibition at Waldemarsudde. I had no idea it was possible to create such paintings with just watercolours.

Of course, if you compare any other artist to the wondrous beauty I drew above, you will understand that the truth, beauty and light I can imbue into the paper is superior to that of all other human beings. Incidentally, this is what my notes looked like at a recent master's thesis presentation at school. I only have to attend two more to get my M Sc!

I just realized that I have been a vegetarian for almost ten years. It was, I recall, sort of a new year's resolution I made in the last trembling, fluttering hours of 1998. Then I ate some sort of hunted down, killed, frozen (as a part of the recipe, I kid you not, they call it tjälknöl here in Sweden) and heated wild animal steak. After that I watched a bit of fireworks and stayed off the meat. I did for some reason eat chicken (I recall it tasting horrible) a few times during 1999, and I think I could not resist gobbling down a few pieces salmon sushi (I recall it tasting great) either. Except for a few accidents like when I swallowed an octopus tentacle in Japan, and probably a few involuntary ingestions of gelatine, carmine and what have you, I have stayed completely vegetarian since. Vegetarian as in "still drink milk and eat cheese etc" that is.

In the beginning my vegetarianism was an ethical decision. Then I got older, colder and a bit less interested in the fate of cows and chickens suffering pain unspeakable in the giant factories. Nowadays I am just not really interested in eating meat. Of course, the ecological implications are a major factor, too. Not eating meat decreases the resources necessary for my continued existence quite a lot, which is all good.

I did sort of expect that I would have a bit of a problem, what with vitamins and all, but none of my medical checkups have ever revealed any deficiencies. Yay for that.

In game news I tested out Red Alert 3. It felt no different to Red Alert 2. Or Red Alert 1. The new, ingenious thing is the option to build your base in the water. Wow. Other games have developed and evolved the genre, even without any fantastic new features, such as Company of Heroes, which was much more beautiful and involving. Red Alert 3, though, is like a cow having been milked so much its udder has become a rotting, bloody mess. I suppose its aimed at gamers half my age (and I sure did appreciate the first Command & Conquer when it was released), but I will still take this opportunity to say Red Alert bores me. Right now I am considering whether to give Dead Space a try, or if I should get a cheap Xbox 360 to play Gears of War 2 and other stuff that seems fun.

Fall Out

I finished Murakami's After the Quake rather quickly. It was thoroughly awesome, and the only thing that saddens me is the fact that there is no more Murakami translated into the English language for me to read. This is the bee's poop, so to speak.

I thus went by the little recommendation slips the clerks put on their favourite books in the bookstore, and got myself a book called Number9dream by David Mitchell, whom I have never heard of before. The first chapter was promising enough, weaving very fluidly between reality and the protagonist's fantasies. Then the book starts alternating between recent events and his childhood, turning suddenly into a gangster story. It gets just a wee bit confusing at times, but the book has really hooked me. I would have finished it in a sitting or two if it had not been for the release of Fallout 3 and my subsequent playing of the game.

Ah, Fallout 3. It is, imho, indeed the "Oblivion with guns" that some people made it out to be. But it would not have been reasonable to expect it to resemble the old games too much. After all, this is the third millenium and a game cannot for some reason be based on solid writing and pure fun alone. Anyway, great graphics, great open environments, lots of bugs, extremely limited replayability. I loved most of it and finished the main story in about 20 hours. The story was ok, faring quite well when compared to other computer games, but the ending... it was the most retarded thing I have ever been forced to watch.

This is your spoiler alert. Quit reading if you would prefer not to know how the game ends.

So... In the end, I stand at the water purifier thing together with a fancy warrior lady and my sidekick the non-evil super mutant, Fawkes. One of us has to go into the water purifier thing and do a thing to it so it makes everything nice. So far so good. However, there are massive amounts of radiation inside, so that person might die. My friend the super mutant is impervious to strong radiation, which he has proven earlier in the story. However, the only alternatives are going in myself or letting the warrior lady do it. That is... stupid. Either way, the person going in dies and then you get to watch some shots of different parts of the game in black and white. The game ends. What the fuck, come on people. You have one of the greatest computer game franchises ever and you make the lamest ending on earth. Furthermore, even if you decide to be a chicken and not go in yourself, you cannot continue exploring the world, which you could in Oblivion. The game is over, end of story. Also, the game was far too easy (playing on normal level). I was only on level 14 out of 20 when I reached the end, and I still had no problem blasting the hell out of exactly everything I encountered. This all led to the idea of loading an earlier save and exploring the world some more becoming a bit less appealing.

Post 93

93rd post! Ineluki ai, io Pan, eh? We played for a bit with my artsy toys this weekend. Much better than Lego!

Recent stuff I like and dislike:

Dislike: True Blood

I watched the first two episodes and thought that "hey, this could actually become interesting!" Having reached episode six, I am already a bit tired of the series. The characters are simply not plausible enough, or perhaps the divide between their cultural setting and mine makes me see them that way. I dunno. They just act rather flat and stupid, being nothing but stereotypes, and nobody really seems to care for more than five minutes after people die. Also, how the vampires not "mainstreaming" seem to be acting in general would lead to the human populace trying to make them extinct, not giving them equal rights. I might watch a few more episodes and see if it gets better, but I think I will spend my precious time elsewhere (Dexter, reruns of Black Books).


Like: After the Quake

I spent the Sunday afternoon on a bench down by Strandvägen watching people go by and reading Murakami's short story collection After the Quake. Like mostly everything else Murakami, it is awesome. Like his other short stories, these are sad and often unsettling in a way that his novels are not. They give me the same sort of feeling that I sometimes have when I wake up in the morning after having a very strange dream.

Right now, I am listening to Tony Joe White on Spotify, which is actually great, something I seldom say about new software, being old and conservative. The creators seem to have taken their cues from Apple, and it "Just Works". Like Apple products, Spotify has very little added functionality in the way of playlists/recommendations/etc, though, but as long as you only want to hear various songs you like, it is the bee's proverbial knees. Combined with Airfoil, it becomes Party Grand Central at home.


New jacket (Zara, actually), by the way, it goes rather well with one of the shirts I designed recently. I haggled the price down to €30 due to some rather hard to spot defects in the weave on one arm.

And I really, really want the new MacBook Air. Now if they could only make the battery easily replacable. Hell, the battery on my MacBook Pro died in ten months and I have been a very light user of it. I would want the iPhone if it was not so bloody limited. I pine for it, but I fear I will not buy it as long as they put strange, idiotic software limits on it (no MMS, no tethering, no copy/paste, only certain mobile operators) and strange, idiotic hardware limits (arse camera, non-replacable battery). Sigh.

You Will Find Me if You Want Me in the Harbour

I went to the finance job fair at the Stockholm School of Economics last week, just to see old friends and have a look at the banks in general. It was sort of gloomy. A large tent thingy, freezingly cold inside with bad lighting and what simply must have been much fewer exhibitors than what was originally planned. In the current gloom, the Swedish stock market just having taken another plunge, bringing the OMX down by 40 % or so this year, it was all like a portent of things to come.

We live in interesting times, this week beginning on a brighter note with upwards movements as big as last week’s fall, and I guess the bankers were feeling a little bit better about themselves again. Graduating with a major in finance in a few weeks does not currently feel so good, given last night’s volatility putting onion on the salmon, as we say in Sweden.

I took a Sunday walk with Jonny. Nominally to find mushrooms, but as usual, our search yielded nothing edible. We did get to see a castle with adjacent sheep as well as some funny villas, and I bought a nice little bonsai tree I had to lug through the forest for a bit. All in all, quite a nice day.


And I spent some time in the harbour. I like harbours and freight containers and all that stuff.

Golden Bird to Flesh-Textured Marble

I found this table-console-thingy at the local Christian charity store. I would have bought it, had it not cost bloody € 500! They also sell dirty, worn Hugo Boss power suits from the 1980s for €80 or so, which is almost as bad. Sometimes I find worthwile stuff, though, like my new, spiffy pipe stand and my 1930s full-body mirror.

I am officially the worst floor-oiler ever. My previously nice but dry floor is now glossy, spotty and strange. I hope I can avoid re-polishing it, at least. Current research: Scotch Brite. Hard work, but yields results, sort of.

Hopefully, I will hear some very good news in a week or two. For me, not for you.

Armania

The cat did not like her shower, but her paws smelled of the wee, so it was inevitable.

I am reading Haruki Murakami's latest (translated, at least) novel, After Dark, and as usual I find his popular culture references rather boring. That is, however, what is expected. Fantastic novels with lots of jazz and Beatles which mostly feels out of place - since they take place in Japan and nobody listens to Japanese music. I could be wrong, but Japanese people might do that some of the time. Anyway, Murakami's world is usually a bit of a wonderland, so I can forgive him for that.

What I have a hard time forgiving him, or for that matter lots of other authors, for is the usage of brand names when symbolizing exclusivity or expensiveness. From Bret Easton Ellis to Charles Stross to Murakami, everybody writes "Armani" when describing "expensive", because that is just such a convenient, well-known brand. However, having a pair of "Armani glasses" (as in After Dark) does not mean a person is rich or even middle class, damn it. Armani (not counting the Borgonuovo 21 or Classico stuff which I recall is more expensive) is not a particularly expensive label. Even though it is in many cases an order of magnitude more pricey than really cheap clothing, it is an order of magnitude less expensive than some other stuff many people would recognize and I guess two orders of magnitude less than some other stuff I would never recognize. Point being, could people please be a little more varied and not use the same brand over and over again. I would be happy even if they mixed it up with a bit of Prada, Cartier and Bulgari, though I guess these do not carry the same "booooooring!" connotations.

Oh, the book is great, by the way. Hitherto.

Done

Moving: done.


After moving, I took a walk past the royal castle. Apparently, somebody had been fishing junk out of the water.


We also went mushroom hunting in the countryside. Nothing found, but it was a very nice walk.

The cat with many names, the current one being Bubblan ("the bubble"), loves the new apartment, and so do I. It is very bright, despite it being the first of October, and with no curtains up yet, the sunlight awakes me in the morning. It rocks. Sure, it takes a bit longer to get to work in the morning, but that is nothing compared to the joy of living closer to... perhaps not nature, but at least a few trees.

I am sort of surprised by the financial blaha in the world. Not so much by the behaviour of individuals as by their total inability to work together to further their own ends in the long run.

As an investment banker friend of mine said; "Everybody was playing chicken, and nobody steered out of the way before it was too late."

It is no wonder that things happened. Sooner or later, the idiot lending to people who could not pay had to end. Using an interest rate of one per cent when calculating would inevitably lead to disaster in a world where it can rise to ten times that or more, as it has done before. But the slick guys giving out credit cared only about their own short term winnings. Which is fine. That is what usually motivates people to work. What is not fine is that the management of the institutions did not have the appropriate checks in place, incentive programs if you will, to make their employees act in a "responsible" way. That is, create value for the shareholders. Apparently, the shareholders had not created the right kind of incentives for management either. And so it goes, mostly everybody loses and a small number of people have their pockets full of money, but not nearly as much as this mess has cost. Ergo, a big fucking net loss to society which makes a great case for those craving greater regulation of financial markets. Regulation for regulation's sake sucks, but I really wonder how to combat this sort of events in a completely "free" market.

Now to go pick up the engagement rings, though my lady is currently in a foreign land, in a foreign time.

Fuckup Fixed

I am sitting at the bank, with their birch veneer desks and faux art deco sofa, waiting to get some sort of mortgage fuckup fixed. I have no clue as to the whats and whys, but I do know I am dead tired of all the various crap I have had to deal with since buying my new apartment.

It started out last autumn, when I bough a spiffy 1920s flat as centrally as central can be. Not the best area in town, but certainly the most convenient one. It ended up losing a lot of value and not exactly being the ideal apartment, so I got a new, smaller apartment in a fancier neighbourhood. Then I did not manage to sell the old one, and both apartments' value plunged, and my stomach hurt, and everything sucked. In the end I lost about €50,000 or so, which was about all the money I owned, but not my sanity. So tomorrow I will, together with my sanity and sans my riches, move into the new apartment. Yay for that.

I read a bit about that idiot kid in Finland who gunned down and set fire to his classmates. What is the deal with including other people in your suicide? And, asks the deranged part of my brain, if someone is purportedly "at war with humanity" or whatever, how the hell do they not manage to off more than ten or so of their completely unprepared "enemies"? How come almost no insane (that is non-religious, non-political) people who hate the world actually manage to kill a lot of people? Or are there political leaders whose career is just there to mask a love of making life miserable for others? I can think of quite a few candidates.

Now, I go move some heavy things. I have seventy moving boxes or so, but I cannot for the life of me understand why. I am not really a "stuff" person in that I save lots of crap. I try to only have useful things and things which are bearers of value (such as nice ceramic items), but I still end up with a mountain of items which are much more trouble than they are worth. I should take this opportunity to ease up on my dragonity and give some of my hoard away to people more dragonesque.

Horror Spory

Spore was promised to be a revolutionary game. It was not. It was shallow, boring and ultimately very unfulfilling. Aside from being able to design rather cute creatures, there was no lasting appeal at all, and only the first stage, lasting all of ten minutes, was actually fun. None of the promised fantastic modifiability was ultimately delivered, and all the stages (except the aforementioned first) were like very, very bad clones of other games. How the hell have they managed to hype this game so much?

Add to this the fact that the game has such intrusive DRM (copy protection, for the untechnically inclined) that many people will not be able to play it at all. The publisher, EA, asserts that the DRM is there to protect Spore from pirates. This is bollocks. The DRM is there to protect from people sharing it within the family selling the game to friends or second hand shops when they have tired, and they will be tired of it very quickly indeed, because Spore takes almost no time at all to complete. The DRM works in a devious way, since it requires activation over the Internet, and you can only activate thrice. If you upgrade your computer, you might need to reactivate. Reinstall Windows? Reactivate. Use it on another account on the same computer? Reactivate! You can phone EA who can give you more activations - at their leasure (and who knows when they decide to stop answering that particular phone line?). This naturally makes the game's value in the second hand market very low or nonexistent, since the buyer has no way of assessing whether the particular copy of the game has any activations left or will be granted new ones. Also, a person owning Spore will be very reluctant to lend the game to friends or family, since any such usage will trigger an activation.

Essentially, what EA is doing is that they no longer sell you a game, they rent it out at an exorbitant price instead. Well, good thing it sort of sucked, because I will not feel I missed out. Never buy DRM crap. Instead, support games with no DRM at all (Sins of a Solar Empire) or unintrusive DRM (Oblivion).

After Dark

Right now I am in the process of moving, so my angry reviews of Spore (major suck) and Crysis: Warhead (minor suck) will have to wait, as will that of the new Charles Stross book I picked up (good one!). So busy am I that I have not even read Murakami's After Dark yet.

This is what we do when the sunlight fades:

Being hugged by the fiancée

The beauty of lazily flapping angels

Being hugged by the fiancée II

Fixing the hairdo with some sort of hand moistening lotion

Public Morals Committee

The last week was spent mostly in bed, having fever dreams about atomic bombs, the public morals committee and an aggravated fiancée. Needless to say, it was not exactly fulfilling. I did read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, though, after having it on my to read-list for ages. It was not exactly a mindblowing experience, but it was a really good book, and I would have appreciated it even more had I been, say, 14 or so instead of 27. I guess the main grievance I had with the book was its lack of depth, but I fear I have been distancing myself a bit too much from "simple" (though not in a negative sense) literature like Ender's Game, i.e. books where you fully understand (or at least believe you do) the plot. I got a bit of an Ayn Rand feeling from the book - the seemingly effortless integration of ideology. Had Rand been able to write like Card, she might have gotten some points across. As it is, I honestly could not even be arsed to finish Atlas Shrugged, and Anthem just left me with an "I want that hour back!" feeling.

So after reading Ender's Game, what else could I do but fire up Sins of a Solar Empire on my trusty old pc? I get this feeling that the game is very much like what Card envisioned, and that the creators of the game have read his books. It is not exactly a fantastic game, but I think I have never experienced another game that saps time so quickly. I played for six hours and it felt like, oh, half an hour or so. When not having a cold and nothing to do, I am afraid I will never have the opportunity or inclination to do that again, so it was a good thing I won.

Next up: lots of pictures, because they are more enjoyable than text.

A Slow Descent Into Madness

I just finished reading The Lover of Ursa Major (the Swedish translation from 1938) by Sergiusz Piasecki, a 1937 book about smugglers on the border between Poland and Soviet. It was quite a refreshing read, being very different from most present-day books I have been reading recently. Interestingly, people and locales are very sparingly described, being mostly "a man with a funny gait" or "a house in the woods". Yet, the way in which it is written makes the story come alive much more than I had expected. Another thing I noticed was that there was a lot of what seemed like foreshadowing going on, but most of it never led to anything. Large parts of the book describe events that have no bearing upon the upcoming chapters, and many characters who could be expected to play a major part just disappear. I thought at first that this was a book about friendship, love and alcohol in about equal doses, but I realized partway through that it is much more about a slow descent into madness. The latter might make more sense if you know a bit more about Piasecki's life and his imprisonment.

The author does not seem exceptionally skilled in the art of the novel, but that is not so strange, given that he was a Polish intelligence officer (who smuggled cocaine and furs across the Polish/Soviet border to fund his operations) writing the book in prison. He had been incarcerated for ten years for a robbery conducted under the influence of cocaine, and apparently passed his time in prison writing books and inciting riots. All in all, he seems like an uncommonly serious badass for a famous novelist, and that is not even taking into account the fact that he was later an executioner for the Polish resistance during WWII.

Anyway, the book was enjoyable, largely for deviating so much from the books of today, but also because the story was engrossing in its simplicity. It felt very real, and given Piasecki's track record, parts of it probably are.

Sten Tolgfors is a liar (and so is Ingvar Åkesson)

I have a hard time understanding the yes-side in the debate about the new Swedish "FRA law", which stipulates that all Internet traffic into and out of the country should be monitored by the FRA for - guess what - security reasons. The Minister for Defence, Sten Tolgfors, has actually stated in a major Swedish newspaper that this is certainly not "mass surveillance", since the FRA is only allowed to spy on information going out of the country, and according to specific search terms (which are not disclosed). Furthermore, there are unspecified "controls" which "monitor" their actions.

Well, guess what, Mr Tolgfors, you cannot really find the specific data allowed to be spied upon without looking at all the data, now can you? Somewhere within the deep, dank caves of government, all the Internet traffic will be caught and processed, and Swedish citizens will have absolutely no way of knowing how, where or when. The spooks will have the authority to map everybody's life without a warrant. One of the justifications is that "Hey, we could actually catch bin Ladin, Sweden might be al-Qaida's next taget!" Guess what? Mr bin Ladin encrypts his Internet traffic. Mr bin Ladin does not have a beef with Sweden. Mr bin Ladin is just a straw man for a government increasingly desperate to secure their insane law.

The government's statements are so bloody stupid that I am unsure whether Mr Tolgfors really believes in what he is saying, or if he has made devious calculations coming to the conclusion that a large enough part of population are such complete idiots that his cause can actually profit from his lies. I hope for the former but suspect the latter. Also, I sort of wonder what the ulterior motives are. More power for the government? More happiness from the U.S.? Transition into a fascist state? None of my guesses are particularly uplifting.

Oh, and from the horse's (the General Director of FRA, Ingvar Åkesson) mouth. My translation, mind you.

"FRA has never and will never 'monitor all citizens'. Only the traffic that is deemed to be interesting and that refers to foreign circumstances is selected, which is a fraction of all available traffic. Only a very small part of this information will in turn ever end up in FRA's system." (emphasis mine)

Apparently, Mr Åkesson is nothing short of a liar, because you cannot really be the General Director of the Swedish equivalent of the NSA and not know that to be able to select the interesting information, you have to somehow process all the information from which you want a subset of information. The "interesting traffic" does not automagically jump into the lap of the FRA, while the rest of the bytes flow past, unperturbed and unmonitored. Ergo, everybody's business is now showbusiness to the FRA.

Genetic Engineering Facility

So, now I have had my vacation for this year. It consisted mostly of painting walls, buying furniture I do not like and moving things around. That is, preparing for another attempt at selling my old apartment. All in all, it has been a pretty crappy vacation with a few notable highlights.

My cat seems to really like living with me. Not only does she follow me around everywhere, she also seems to genuinely like living with me, and seems to have no interest at all in leaving. If I leave the door open, she just sits by the door looking moderately interested. She also seems to have the best night temper of all cats I have ever encountered. She curls up at the bottom of the bed when I go to sleep, and she is still there when I wake up. No running around hitting things, no waking me up by screaming or sitting on my face. Maybe she escaped from a genetic engineering facility trying to produce the perfect cat. Her only real problem is the fact that she is a bit too obsessed about her food, but given that she has been living on the rough for at least a month, that is to be expected. I think she is slowly realizing that there is an ample serving of food twice daily, and that there is no need to make a fuss about an empty bowl.

Right now, I am going through piles of old CDs and DVDs I have burned during the years, in the hope of finding something worthwhile. There were some pictures from my 2001 trip to Japan, songs I wrote back in the 90s, embarrassing party pictures and a lot of music I had forgotten I ever used to listen to. All in all some great reminiscing.

As for the last few weeks?

We visited the museum of natural history or whatever they call it in English. This fish says "nom nom nom *buuurp!*" if you feed it the correct "food bricks" or "blääää!" if you feed it the wrong ones. It is important to feed your catfish properly.

I saw the first boat ever that actually made me lust for it. A 60 foot trimaran. Sadly, I think this one is not only insanely expensive, but strictly for professionals. It is also ocean-going.

I looked about as happy as usual.

I finally tried some durian together with a friend. It smelled like hot garbage and tasted like hot garbage (or rather, how I assume it would taste) mixed with fruit. I will not try durian again.

Stockholm is really beautiful during the summer. I caught the Gotheborg on a picture.

As a stark contrast, they have recently finished building this "hotel" in the middle of the picture - in central Stockholm, no less, blocking what was once a beautiful view from Norra bantorget (on the other side of the hotel, from the vantage point above), making one of the nicer bits of the city dark and dreary. It looks like a futuristic rendition of Naglfar. At least, that is what I call it. What the hell were they thinking? Progress is not making the city look like the worst of Soviet.

RIP RAW

Going through a lot of old discs, I found a picture of me (jeez, I am glad I stopped looking like that) and Robert Anton Wilson when we met in Stockholm in 2000 or so. It brought back memories not only of meeting him, but of all my Discordian friends and the various weird stuff we used to do. Those were the days, indeed. Rest in peace, RAW, we are still thinking about you.

Hobocore

This is the hobo-cat I found and who now lives with me. She is the sweetest cat I have ever met, but she is so whiny about food all the time. If I gave her as much food as she demands, she would probably have eaten herself to death already.


This is a human hobo I met recently. I was going to give him some food, but he left. Notice the fancy hobocore socks.

Spirit of the Gym

There is a computer game of some sort called Pangya Golf with Style or something. I have never played it, nor have I ever been interested in doing so. However, my sleep tonight was a bit weird (too much beer, I guess) and I apparently played the game in the world of dreams. It was awesome, and was like a cross between minigolf/putting practice and a Harry Potter movie or Pan's Labyrinth! All of the holes had gargoyle eggs or magickal stones, and a griffin circled in the sky. I was a bit nervous, because the whole situation was sort of eerie. Then all was well again except for the fact that my lizard (a lizard I actually had many years ago) was biting a big yellow frog, and I had to bend her jaws open to separate them. Ah, dreams.

After another apartment-selling failure, I went to the gym today to work off a bit of frustration. Training harder than usual, I was dizzy, sweaty and exhausted when I finished my workout. Then I saw her. A woman I believe I saw five years ago or something when I was training at another gym. She looked exactly as beautiful and radiant now as then, she went through the same motions, still totally oblivious of her surroundings, wearing headphones. So self-occupied was she, that I realized that she is probably just the Spirit of the Gym, appearing to those who need encouragement. I notice these things, and I was encouraged.

The Horror

The horror. The most intrusive law ever devised has passed a vote in the Swedish parliament. All traffic on the Internet (except that which does not cross the Swedish borders, which is of course bullshit) will be monitored and collected by FRA (previously the National Defence Radio Establishment, though I guess they will change their name to the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit). This of course interferes with freedom of speech, press freedom and a host of other things people in a developed democracy would take for granted. Not in Sweden, not anymore. We will be an Airstrip Two, or Three, or Four, I am losing count, for Oceania. The law is nominally to stop "terror" and stuff like that, despite the fact that Sweden has basically never seen any terror at all. The money could be spent elsewhere, such as the armed forces, which have recently been downsized so much that Sweden would hardly be able to defend itself against any realistic threat.

This abomination of a law was approved by almost all members of the centre-right ruling coalition, save for Birgitta Olsson (who voted a courageous "dunno") and Camilla Lindberg, the only person courages enough to stand up for her beliefs. In all honesty, I would like to see the yes-voters tried for treason. However, I am not entirely sure whether it is illegal to subvert and destroy democracy.

Also, I found a cat on the street and we liked each other. I took it to the vet for a check-up and to see whether it had an owner. Since it was completely unmarked, it now lives with me. Pics later.

Aliens Solve Equations

Reading the latest Greg Egan book, I am both surprised and disappointed. While well-written and intelligent as is par for the course with Egan, Incandescense is really quite boring. Sure, describing how an alien race goes about measuring velocities and orbits could set the background for a story, but when half the story is about how said aliens solve equations with two unknowns and work with derivatives... nah. (The other half, without ruining the story, is about two people trying to find stuff in the universe, and it is not that hot either.) Simply not my type of book, especially since it contains very little of the philosophical issues that Egan usually raises. I guess I will follow the story to the end, though, but this is more because of my general love for Egan than an actual compulsion to finish the book. Incandescense will be on hold a while, though, while I read Neal Stephenson's Cobweb which seems more promising.

Also, I will present my master's thesis tomorrow, which would be a thing worthy of great celebrations (Rotari rosé at least) under different circumstances. However, what with my apartment crisis, I have a very hard time finding the enthusiasm. Also, the resulting payment of €2,600 a month in rent plus mortgages sort of puts a stop to doing anything fun involving money and forces me to take no vacation at all this year and work instead. Balls.

Down at the Porn Store

I live pretty close to one of the larger porn stores in Stockholm and sometimes when I feel bored or just want to spend some time away from computers, I go spy on its clients. I know, I am closer to 30 than 20 and should not take such obvious pleasure in spying on people for no good reason at all. But still, everybody needs hobbies. At times, I have even brought my camera, shooting with a 200 tele the customers entering and exiting the establishement. Why? Because they all look so fucking guilty! A sluggish gait, their backs slightly bent, they look like they have received a harsh sentence indeed. Maybe they just want to look inconspicuous, who knows. Anyway, the tele lens in question sucks in low light conditions, so the pictures are mostly blurry. I still save them in my archive of completely pointless electronically stored things.

Another funny thing with these men is that they all look to be between, say, 30 and 40. They also all wear really mundane clothes and look perfectly boring. I would have guessed, ex ante, that people renting Fuckenfest Achtung Total 14 or whatever clicks their dicks, would be old geezers not aware of the endless supply of free porn on the Internet for those so inclined.

Me? I greatly prefer the endless supply of great comics on the Internet.

Entropy: Increased

What is the deal with those fiftyfive-ish men with rather big beards and often, but not always a tiny bit of a beer belly? They tend to sport dark brown or green hats, felt or leather, with wide brims and sometimes a leather vest (of the "practical" kind, not the "gay man" or "biker" kinds) which looks like it has been used for many years but has been well taken care of. These men almost always wear a shirt of some kind. Not a dress shirt, but a practical one made out of thicker cotton with at least one pocket. The colour of the shirt is often olive green, greyish or brown.

The fact that some men look like this does not bother me at all, what bothers me is that they are almost always alone, and they almost always look happy! I want to know what they know that I do not know. I believe they might hold the keys to heaven, but they are apparently not sharing them. They are like Mona Lisas with beards! Also, I wonder if the communicate - and how do they procreate? My theory is that they do it like amoebas. They duck into a dark alley and just split, one smug, enigmatic man then coming out each end, only the shade of their hat telling them apart. I did admittedly see two of them together, though. Once. I guess that was just because they had accidentally divided in a one-way alley or something. Oh well.

I am having a bit of a personal hell with my apartment business. In hindsight, it was apparently pretty fucking stupid to buy a new apartment before selling the old one. But, since I talked to I think ten different estate agents who all promised that it would be a piece of cake to sell mine, I was lulled into a false sense of security and now I have two apartments and not enough money to even pay interest on the loans. Damn you, estate agents.

My plan consisting of "healthy food and exercise" to lose a few kilos has apparently backfired. I have gained three or four kilos in as many months. I hope, at least, that it can be attributed to building muscles. However, it so happens that every time I go to the gym, I feel a bit guilty for increasing the entropy in the universe more than usual, speeding up the process of heat death. I wonder if this means I am deranged or just nerdy.

Eris

I have met a nice young lady who paints for a living. Since I have no disposable money to speak of at present, I offered her a bunch of highly-specialized art books in exchange for making a fantastic painting of the Goddess Eris, chief deity of Discordianism. I think it turned out quite well, despite a minor incident where I smudged the cat. It will hang in a place of honour in my new apartment as soon as I get it framed.

Listerine

I just accidentally rubbed my eye with a hand covered in eye-unsuitable substances numerous times. You know the story, tabasco, vinegar, pepper... This time it was toothpaste. Toothpaste is slightly better than tabasco or tiger balm, but not by much. I guess this little mistake was due to the fact that I had just happened to brush not only my teeth but also a downright evil blister which lives in my mouth since I decided it was a good idea to start eating my own mouth in my sleep. Needless to say, it hurt. Both blister and eye. After blinking frantically for a minute or so, I brought forth the evening's heavy artillery - Listerine. All my friends have told me that this apparently makes blisters go away in a jiffy. I have been on the listerine for three days now, and the blister has only gotten worse, so I thought I would try to hold the Listerine in my mouth for a while. Sure, that stuff is comparatively strong, but I am used to drinking stroh rum straight, and it has never been a problem before. I held it in for half a minute or so, and then a horrible throbbing agony from hell entered my normally just plain agony-inducing blister. In the hope that this meant the Listerine was actually working, I held it in for a while while almost dropping to my knees in pain. Then I spat, and it suddenly stopped hurting altogether. Cautiously, I tried some more Listerine. Illogically, no pain? Though I cannot be sure, I might actually have successfully exorcised an oral cavity demon.

I have spent time reading books, working, worrying and writing on a script for a comic instead of blogging. The latest books I read were I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max as well as Glasshouse and Jennifer Morgue, both by Charles Stross.

The Tucker Max book was just as I expected it to be, fantastically funny in a few select places and, from my perspective, rather boring in most of the others. The man is certainly talented, but I would personally enjoy some stories that are not almost exclusively about alcohol and hooking up. Although I guess if your life revolves around that and writing about it gives you more of it, why not.

The Charles Stross books were a bit different. I actually got the first one on a whim. I went into a bookstore which has a large selection of softcover books in English and asked the woman at the infodesk to recommend me eight good books, since they have a standing 4-for-3 rebate and I wanted a bunch of new stuff. I specificially told her not to give me boring books or political books, and preferably hard sf or sort of weird fiction like Murakami or Auster. I was sort of stressed, I suppose, because I have no idea what books I bought. I stuffed them randomly into my shelves (I will be moving soon, no reason to waste time cataloguing) where there was room except for one, Glasshouse by Stross. The store clerk had told me that some of her sf customers had told her that this was hot stuff, so I started there.

The plot was good, the writing never got in the way, the twists were mostly good and the ending was, I guess, satisfactory. I am very picky with endings. The book dealt with a lot of philosophical far-future sf stuff like uploading, clones, identity theft, etc, and it put this in a present-day context through plot devices I shall not spoil. I got some nice Greg Egan vibes from it, and decided I would try another Charles Stross book.

I picked Jennifer Morgue, and it was quickly apparent that I should have done something else instead. While the basic idea is bearable and sometimes fun - occult stuff exists and various governments have special units to combat it - it is not terribly original, and the story must be rather good to make up for that. Instead, Stross has made some sort of a mix between Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon and, I dunno, any Terry Pratchett Discworld novel. However, while Stross has certainly shown that he can write, he is not funny in the way that Terry Pratchett is funny and he just will not stop hammering his points in. The whole novel basically says "Haha, PowerPoint sucks! It's cool to be a Linux nerd!"

Jennifer Morgue is full of obscure references, which I think will alienate most readers, and the plot is very, very implausible, in a non-amusing way. The ending is rather forced and most of the characters feel like cardboard. This disparity has led me to believe that I have to read another one of his books, just because I am fascinated by the fact that they seem to be written by different authors. This is not to say that the book has no redeeming qualities. It is funny at times, it does have some interesting plot devices, but I think Stross' editors should have told him to "cut out some technomumble and refine the plot!" Then it could have been great, and, I think, something like Matthew Thomas' Before and After, or - best case scenario - a very light version of the Illuminatus trilogy.

I also went back to the bookstore in question and got the latest Greg Egan novel, Incandescence, which I have been desiring for ages. Up next.

Oh, and I will move on June 2nd. Hopefully. I bought an apartment and now I cannot seem to sell my old one. It stresses me Losec.

Status

Trying to finish thesis, moving to a new apartment, lots of other stuff. Be back soon!

Stalked by Mucha

Recent times have seen me doing more worthwhile stuff, spending less money on crap and I guess generally growing up. I have started going to the gym, thrice weekly. This is nothing short of incredible given the fact that I am usually a lazy bastard who deftly avoids any and all exercise except for very, very long walks. Having been rather skinny all my life, I never felt the need to exercise for the sake of my looks, which I guess is sort of a bad thing, since I have started having back problems due to sitting to much in front of computers all the time and not moving around enough. Ergo, lifting weights! It has become sort of fun, actually, and I have hitherto not missed a single day of training in three or four weeks. Yay!

In other news:


This is so great it is almost silly. Mucha's "Moon" as a backpiece. Of course, as you can see it is not a completely finished tattoo, but getting there.



I bought these great litographs by Hans Viksten at an auction for a shamefully low sum. I have always loved his art, and I suspect that is all about imprinting during my childhood.


This is the piece (another litograph) that was hanging in our home when I was a wee child, and now decorates my bedroom. It rocks.



I must admit I bought the two paintings above only for the very nicely made frames. I thought they were prints or something, but upon closer examination they were actually oil/ink paintings from 1881 by K W Westerberg, whoever that is. They are actually rather nice, so I kept them.


I am not exactly sure what this is. It is from December 1930 and I believe it to be a sort of electricity switch which can be set to turn electricity on for stuff during certain times and certain days of the week. It is rather heavy, very nice, and will sadly be put to sleep to become a regular clock (unless I can find out a way to make it behave like one through bypassing all the weird mechanics).


But life is not all work. Some play must be involved. In hazard suits, with Disaronno. Sorry for the picture quality. We were one mask short, so I had to stick to the goggles.

Between the Sheets

There are times when I am half-asleep and in a state between pondering the world's problems and dreaming about puking monkeys doing the macarena. Suddenly I am jolted awake, having an incredible idea in my head. I scribble it down on a paper, and then I go to sleep. Later on, I wake up and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

Last evening was one of those episodes. I devised the ultimate financial system, better than capitalism, communism and whatnot. It looked like this:


The day after, I woke up and realized that it was complete and utter shite, with assumptions so ridiculous that only an economist would not laugh at them. I especially wonder why the curve is s-shaped, so that rising above a certain level, the citizen suddenly costs society money again. Not to mention the problem of actually discerning the amount of production the individual citizen engages in.


I also bought a whole kilogram of sweet licorice which was just stupid. My tummy hurts. At least I found a cthulhu candy in the (bottom of the) bag.

American Psychopomp

I had the weirdest, weirdest dreams. Not only did I have several psychopomp episodes fleeting between dreaming and reality, with strange shadowy characters in the room with me, both benevolent and malicious. I also dreamed that the Tokugawa Shogunate emerged from the sea around the United States aboard gigantic submarines. I would not have been so surprised, had I been drunk or something, but it was just a regular Wednesday night.

I got the raddest shirt ever, by the way. Pictures soon.

Embarrassment of a Solar Empire

I had another "saying stupid things on national television" episode today. I am to be in some sort of fashion show hosted by Hanna on Z TV, aired tomorrow, and I sort of dressed up in tight, dark blue jeans, a turquoise dress, a horrible grey sweater and a shabby Burberry coat. Then I talked about how this style was inspired by "rural nobility" (sic!). All in all, I was almost as silly as the time when I appeared as a post-apocalyptic techno rocker (speaking of which - only a few months left 'til Fallout 3 - woo!!!).


I also met a very nice hobo. Hanna gave him some cigarettes and he talked about his homeless life for a while, relating to us a story about how he had fallen asleep this weekend, drunk as hell, outside a local theatre. Some women had apparently painted his nails and put on lipstick while he was sleeping, which would have been a so-so prank, even had they been his friends or something. Doing it to people on the edge of society, however, is just fucked up.

He admitted to stealing the yucca palm leaves he wore as ears, or horns, I dunno. He justified it with a simple "the yucca palm has 500 leaves, and new ones will grow!" I thought it was pretty poetic.

Yesterday evening was spent testing Sins of a Solar Empire. It is a new space strategy game rather devoid of unique ideas but with a lot of things going for it like the sheer scale in combination with possibilities for micromanagement, nice graphics and a generally nice feel to it. Sort of like Supreme Commander in space.

At first, I felt I was in love. However, on the smallest map, it took me about three hours to corner the enemy civilization, not even defeating it. If a casual game lasts at least half a day, how are people without unlimited quantities of time supposed to play it? However, problems quickly became apparent, such as the AI being a bit retarded, the scout ships being nigh impossible to destroy in time, the pirate raids becoming very tedious, and so on. And, there is no campaign in the game, only skirmish. Come on! I like playing campaigns, even if they are badly written and rather short. They give me some sort of purpose and motivation for playing, instead of just taking some short "Eurasia and Oceania have always been at war" at face value. Anyway, I will not be buying this unless they come out with some (a lot of) fixes.

Scratch that. I will not be buying it, because if its crappy aspects get fixed, I will spend far, far too many hours playing it.

Proto-lolcats

I was rummaging around my belongings today and found an old passepartout with nine little pictures in it, cats with catchy captions! Upon closer examination of the tergo, it appears these were collectible pictures. Smoke a pack, get a kitten. And not any kitten picture, an old-school lolcat picture! Hey, how is that for an incentive structure?


(The author would like to clarify that he is for some reason not especially amused by lolcats in general, and these are almost as bad. This is pretty strange since the author has liked many, many other retarded Internet memes. He will now stop writing about himself in third person.)


Here are the guys responsible. De Reszke. Sounds much like a bad (and apparently aristocratic) guy or guyette in an old Bond movie. Most probably a sinfully sexy lady who falls in love with Mr Bond towards the end of the movie and pays with her life for that mistake. Or who sits in front of her computer all night reloading icanhascheezburger.com.

I would write something about how this exemplifies the proliferation of memes online and offline through the ages, but I really cannot be arsed. Find somebody cultural to do that for you.

KTHXBYE.