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.

Cash is King

I have not been able to stop myself completely from rummaging around various vintage stores. Below are two of my best finds during recent weeks.


This is a suit from Peter von Holland, whom I have not heard of previously. I found it at the Myrorna (mostly used crap but some used non-crap and some non-used brilliant stuff) store by Adolf Fredriks Kyrka, for those of you who are interested. They had lots and lots of clothes that must be from some sort of deadstock. The price tags were in Dutch, so I wonder how all the stuff ended up here. Anyway, this was the best piece I could find, note the buttons!


I love this knitted Johnny Cash sweater. It is actually knitted that way, not just coloured or some other simple process. Also, I am trying to re-learn my long lost guitar skills, and I thought the new sweater made it fitting to start with the Johnny Cash version of Hurt. Though dead simple, the fingers on my left hand still hurt like hell.

The Things Men do

I have spent my recent time working, playing Team Fortress 2 and planning for yet another move. This time, however, I expect I will be letting someone else do the heavy lifting, because the November move was one of the most gruelling experiences of recent years.

In other news, happy new country, Kosovo! Not that I am a Balkan expert, but I think the right thing happened, more or less. Let us all hope that both Serbia and Kosovo join the European community, perhaps not as amiable friends, but at least with some sort of an armistice (such as PRC and RoC).

Oh, and if you are Swedish, please do not miss Maciej Zaremba's latest series of articles. I sometimes wish I was a demagogue of even half his skill, but if just a quarter of what he says is true, I am appalled.

Powder

I found a very interesting web site called Fun-Motion. It collects links to and information about physics games. That is, games in which physics play an important part.


One of the games linked on the site, Powder Game, reminded me of when I was a child sitting in front of a Mac Plus and playing some sort of "simulation" game with fish and sharks. If the sharks were many, they ate most of the fish, but then they starved, which resulted in the fish multiplying again - on and on it went, fish represented by grey squares and sharks by black. It has no meaning and no end. In Powder Game, however, you can affect what happens through dropping water on fire, magma on ice or virus on fireworks, for instance, everything being represented by colourful dots. I love it! I will have to test some of the other games the site links, but for now I am perfectly content with dropping nitro in the fan.

Also, among the real games, I have been playing Eets a bit. It is loads of fun in small doses and, for those of us who are law-abiding, well worth the ten bucks it costs.

Watch this space for a bunch of new pics coming soon.

A Severed Head at the Very Top of the Construct

Before being abruptly awakened by my constantly refurbishing neighbours, I had an interesting dream. Somebody had built a large sculpture, or rather device, of sorts. It was made entirely out of glass and chrome, resembling a sort of M C Escher figure. It had two parts, capitalism and socialism, which looked exactly alike. When these two parts were joined, a little mound of earth appeared at the very top of the construct, and a severed human head should be placed thereupon. This was apparently the epitome of human ideology.

Speaking of human ideology, I have been following the media reporting regarding the legal action against The Pirate Bay with some interest. It is both amusing and disheartening to see incompetent journalists (Svenska Dagbladet, in this case) describing file sharing on the 'net as "a pyramid structure of a Bandidos type" (er, what?!) where almost all unlicensed media files online are distributed by "the scene", a network of shady, evil profiteers. The worst thing about this complete bullcrap is not that the media lie or that they bend over and quote the copyright mafia verbatim. It is at times like this (and there have been quite a few) that I really start questioning whether what they write about other subjects, those I am not intimately familiar with, is true. When unfair and unbalanced becomes outright lies and bought journalists, society is in a dangerous situation.

Well, maybe it has always been this way, and the fact that I once thought that the calling of my life was to be a journalist, noble herald of the truth and defender of the people, pen in hand pointing towards darkened places, has made me at least try to pretend that it is not. Poppycock.

Buttercups

Note to world: David Troupes has begun drawing Buttercup Festival again. Yay Dave! This is by no means an insignificant event.

I had been reading Buttercup Festival for years, and was downright shocked when it quite suddenly ended, my online comic evenings changed forever. I think one of the reasons that I like it so much is how it starts out comparatively trite to slowly become a work of genius. I could keep linking awesome strips all afternoon, but go to the site and read them all instead.

I am still miffed by the fact that my beige Buttercup Festival t-shirt got lost. I never lose clothes like that. It is not like I went out dressed one day and then came home topless.