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.