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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
