Uppland

Cats

2009-07-17T16:18:00.000+02:00

Our three cats being fed by the missus. The yellow one suddenly pukes on the floor. The black one sits on a kitchen chair, watching him. Yellow cat jumps onto the windowsill and is just about to puke all over the basil when the lady grabs him and steers his head away, resulting in a barfy fountain all over the floor. Black cat looks shocked and pukes right onto the chair she sits on. Black cat #2, having observed the scenario from the floor runs into the hall and spews a small cascade onto the carpet. Yellow cat pukes, again, on the kitchen carpet. All this happened within the span of a minute or so. Apparently, a Stand By Me moment.

Continuing to Undermine Democratic Society

2009-07-07T11:42:00.003+02:00

There have been so many campaigns of various sorts from pro-copyright organisations seeking to stop unauthorized copying of games, music, movies, books and so on. One of their arguments is that it is illegal. That one, I can understand and empathize with. These organisations represent people who profit from consumers paying for the information that they have created, and thus have an interest in keeping consumers paying instead of acquiring the same information for free. It is thus completely reasonable, although I have no idea whether it is actually profitable, that these organisations use education, scare tactics or whatever you want to call it.

What makes me angry is when they use moral arguments. Like the rather outlandish sweeping claims that surface now and then that piracy supports terrorism and organised crime. Sure, if you buy a counterfeit DVD in Hong Kong the triads might earn a few eurocents, but "piracy" as in file sharing of copyrighted materials has a different set of beneficiaries – ISPs, hard drive manufacturers (these guys must make billions thanks to file sharing) and, I believe, computer manufacturers in general since those who pirate games generally spend some money on new computer parts which they would otherwise spend on games if they could not acquire them for free.

No, on the contrary, it is buying music that supports terrorism and organised crime. While I have no hard data on the exact consumption of drugs by musicians signed to a record label, I would say, based on lyrics, the musicians’ own testaments, their many arrests and subsequent releases, and my personal experience, that they consume fucking truckloads of illegal substances. Had it been pot that they were growing in their own wardrobes, fine, I could not care less, but there are lots of musicians that purchase cocaine, speed and all the other nice things that terrorism and organised crime profits from. What is more, the labels generally make no attempts to stop them from continuing to undermine democratic society. Did Pete Doherty lose his record contract for using drugs? Rolling Stones? Nick Cave?

Swedish artist Kleerup was high on cocaine during some sort of music industry narcissism event in January this year and got busted by the police. He was so angry, poor guy, and believed the police had no right to interfere with his life like that. He, however, apparently has a right to support drug wars, social unrest, the killing of police officers and so on in the Americas. Despite this, his records were still stocked by Swedish record stores last time I checked, even though their purchase quite openly supports terrorism. Meanwhile, people named Ahmad and Mohammad have a hard time just sending money back to their families in Somalia, because, you know, terrorism.

So, hey, next time you buy a record, remember a police officer in Tijuana died for it.

Jolly Good

2009-04-14T15:17:00.000+02:00

I spent Easter in the countryside by a beautiful forest, and now I am wondering why I live in the big city. I fed apples to horses and wood to the stove and it was all very nice. I also finished the novel Ghostwritten on the train. It was mostly awesome but had a bit of a let-down for an ending. Considering it instead a collection of short stories, it is an even better book. I also read Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein which was much worse than I would have guessed. Given that he is one of the best writers in comics ever, I was surprised that his novel was much like a coprolaliac Pratchett. There was humour and there was intelligence and there was a good basic idea and there was no joy in reading it. Speaking of Pratchett, his latest book Nation was great. Given his Alzheimer’s and all, I was more hoping than expecting him to release something new, but it was the usual fare. Jolly good, that is.

Economics of Suicide

2009-03-17T21:50:00.003+01:00

Current research: The causes and economics of suicide. It is quite an interesting subject. I have been looking at some OECD data and jeez, its all Mark Twainy. I have no clue how to adjust it to arrive at "true" figures of suicide. Also, I have started my new job and I am very happy with it. I basically try to find out if various stuff is cost-effective. Not suicides yet, though, that one is only a hobby.

I am also trying to get rid of my apartment before the market bursts and pus oozes out. It seems like I will have to stay here for some time which sucks, I need another room.

Blagowago

2009-01-19T11:05:00.005+01:00

We had a great Christmas with all the cats, though they did manage to rip my floor asunder.

Tonight, my cat decided not to let me go through the proper stages of sleep, so I stumbled up around 8 thinking "Trans-Siberian Blagowago!" When I get deprived of sleep, I have strange mornings. I wandered around my apartment contemplating the Blagowago until I got my coffee.

And of course there were the usual sophisticated art school parties, including body painting with marker pen and arm stapling.

Old Remix of Mine

2008-12-19T19:14:00.005+01:00

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

2008-12-15T22:15:00.002+01:00

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

2008-12-15T00:09:00.004+01:00

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

2008-12-04T23:57:00.005+01:00

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

2008-11-27T19:17:00.003+01:00

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

2008-11-12T22:46:00.006+01:00

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

2008-11-12T22:26:00.004+01:00

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

2008-11-11T13:41:00.007+01:00

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

2008-11-05T20:25:00.002+01:00

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

2008-10-20T10:56:00.004+02:00

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

2008-10-16T12:20:00.003+02:00

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

2008-10-04T13:56:00.005+02:00

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

2008-10-01T20:56:00.005+02:00

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

2008-10-01T16:28:00.003+02:00

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

2008-09-25T14:54:00.001+02:00

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

2008-09-24T16:14:00.002+02:00

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

2008-09-23T23:11:00.004+02:00

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

2008-09-07T02:12:00.000+02:00

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

2008-08-13T12:58:00.000+02:00

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)

2008-08-06T09:46:00.006+02:00

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

2008-08-05T13:25:00.005+02:00

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

2008-07-10T22:24:00.002+02:00

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

2008-07-07T01:05:00.003+02:00

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

2008-06-30T23:33:00.001+02:00

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

2008-06-19T19:47:00.003+02:00

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

2008-06-16T15:21:00.002+02:00

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

2008-06-13T01:11:00.005+02:00

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

2008-06-05T10:15:00.003+02:00

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

2008-05-22T00:19:00.005+02:00

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

2008-05-21T23:46:00.003+02:00

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

2008-04-26T19:50:00.001+02:00

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

Stalked by Mucha

2008-03-18T18:35:00.006+01:00

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

2008-03-13T15:10:00.004+01:00

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

2008-03-06T15:54:00.004+01:00

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

2008-03-04T15:50:00.007+01:00

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

2008-02-25T21:12:00.008+01:00

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

2008-02-19T00:33:00.003+01:00

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

2008-02-18T14:45:00.003+01:00

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

2008-02-11T16:17:00.001+01:00

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

2008-02-04T01:15:00.000+01:00

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

2008-02-01T10:02:00.000+01:00

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.

Genius II: Awesome

2008-01-28T20:51:00.000+01:00

Some things can only be explained by synchronicity, a higher power, fate or just sheer luck. How else could I explain the relation between the previous post and what I found at the local second-hand store today?

As you have doubtlessly realized, this... lamp thing, it is beyond awesome. Its awesomeness is so great that I cannot even express it. The battery pack weighs two pounds. Its heaviness is yet another testament to its awesome, awesome awesomeness. Regardless, I will be tinkering with it to replace the incumbent incandescents with a big heap of LEDs, given that I can get it bright enough. It would reduce the weight a bit and enhance the reliability a lot. I might be doing something with the ugly wiring, too. The optimal solution would be to be able to pack the batteries on the headband somewhere.

Anyway, I am now a new kind of awesome.

Speaking of awesome, I was reading Salingers Catcher in the Rye and started to think about rye in general, looking for interesting facts. Instead I found a great Russian artist who specialized in landscape painting.

Not only did Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (Иван Иванович Шишкин) look cool, he was a great painter, too! Yay for the fact that the rye field above is readily available for uses such as a desktop background. I did that.

Genius

2008-01-28T10:48:00.003+01:00

Quick tip: Girl Genius

I have no idea how I managed to miss it. I must be retarded or something, because I have loved the art of Phil Foglio since the heydays of Magic: The Gathering and I managed to miss this comic for seven years. Anyway. Girl Genius is a fantabulous webcomic which is not only beautifully drawn, it has a great, Miyazaki-esque steampunky story as well. Check out the rad goggles in their online shop, too. They come in brass or black.

Speaking of that, reading Girl Genius reawakened my love for clothes and trinkets in the combination brass and brown leather, 1800s sci-fi style. I started looking on eBay, but somehow ended up buying these old military (or so the seller stated - but I think they might be for welding) goggles instead.

Yay! High fashion!

Camera Obscura: Pasqui

2008-01-25T15:27:00.000+01:00

Despite being rather poor this month, I went out on a little shopping spree yesterday and got myself a new Pasqui shirt.

Pasqui is one of the dapper brands that I would sort of like to keep to myself, while I would at the same time like to spread the word so that the awesome people (or person - I dunno?) behind it get their well-deserved attention.

Pasqui make shirts. I know nothing more. They make shirts for men and shirts for women, and the former are almost universally cool as hell. They are well-tailored, beautifully colour-matched and have insanely great designs while at the same time being great for almost any setting. They are sort of expensive, so I only have two, but I took a picture over at the store to show some more.

These two are mine, and they rock. I do look like a fatso when sitting down though. They are super extra slim fit something and look great while standing. Not while making funny gestures in the couch. Maybe I should have bought something larger than the smallest size (with extra-long sleeves) they had.

These are the ones in the store, and the rightmost two rock even more, but I have to prioritize in life, and while I like shirts, they are not my number one right now. If it is yours, however, go get one at La Chemise right outside Sturegallerian in Stockholm, or somewhere else in the world.

Pimp My... Pimp

2008-01-21T21:46:00.001+01:00

My friend Anton and I were a bit bored this evening and decided to show the latest pimp fashion from the streets of... I really dunno. Some rather shabby streets, I would guess. Sadly, we had no ladies at hand, or we would have dressed them up, too.

As you can see from my forlorn and somewhat vulnerable look, the life of a pimp is certainly not easy.

Suit: Some sort of Chinese polyester zoot suit I found on eBay for $60
Shirt: Vivienne Westwood
Shoes: Rizzo

Here, Anton can be seen wearing a turban made from a scarf. You need not much to be pimpin' it up.

Suit: Versace Jeans Couture
Shirt: My design
Hat: Paul and Friends
Shoes: Shoto
Lamp: IKEA

Suit: Jan Björk
Shirt: Dunno (and that is not the name of a label)
Hat: As above, so below

Jacket sort of thing: Andrew MacKenzie
Shirt: J Lindeberg
Jeans: Richmond

Suit and shirt: My design and tailored by a nice guy in Thailand
Tie: Röda Sigillet

Snacky Cracky Butter Cheese Sticks: The worst bloody snack I have ever had the malpleasure of tasting

Really. I bought these at Lidl, which is like a foodstore except most of the stuff is crap. You would think that the name Snacky Cracky would be an indication that this was indeed the case with these... sticks. Still, they were sort of funny, and I am not one to balk when an interesting challenge presents itself. This was a mistake, because they taste like dry fat, turning into moist crumbs of wickedness in the mouth. Snappy Crappy have no place in this world.

Needle Sharing

2008-01-18T01:10:00.000+01:00

So I was sitting in a comfy green chair at the local tattoo parlor, sipping some rather weak coffee and reading South of the Border, West of the Sun, a book by, you guessed it, Haruki Murakami. Enter a young man with (what I suppose was) his girlfriend, who starts asking the tattooeress about getting a tattoo. His plan is to buy a needle for the tattoo machine, which he actually says he will share with some other guy for cost reasons, and they will both be tattooed by a third friend. I cannot for the life of me understand why he a) thinks needle sharing is a good way to save money and b) why a tattooer would sell just a needle to someone, and especially someone who sort of plans on getting diseases. It was weird.

But, I am happy to inform you that South of the Border, West of the Sun is, hitherto, the best Murakami book I have read, save for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This means that it is also one of the best books I have ever read. I am so happy to have found an author who is so good that almost all of his books leave me awestruck. I hardly want to read any further, fearing this perfect creation will be ruined somewhere towards the end.

Here You Go, Judas

2008-01-14T23:01:00.000+01:00

I had dreams of awesome quality during the last few days, two of which I must relate.

In the first one, the boss at my job had decided to launch a new brand of Swedish snus (for you foreigners: a sort of orally taken tobacco). The first thing he did was create a commercial for it, to run on tv I guess. It took place in a dusty sort of landscape, fraught with drought. It was desolate, rather bright and very rocky. The film had a sort of Marlboro man feel to it, and it started with a pan over the landscape, whereafter the camera zoomed in upon something at the top of a cliff - a giant iguana! Then a few rugged men lit the iguana on fire and pushed it down into a crevasse. The end.

If you want to sell your brand of tobacco with the help of the above idea, please go ahead, I promise I will buy some.

The other dream was sort of a nightmare. For some reason, there had been a bit of a falling out between me and a person who in real life is very dear to me. What I did was I pulled out a Swedish one krona coin, (about €0.1, $0.15), threw it on the ground in front of her, shouting "Here you go, JUDAS!" to her as I turned and walked away. I have no idea why I dreamed such a thing, seeing as I have not read or thought about Judas recently, and I have no bad feelings toward the person in question. Still, it is an awesome way to end a conversation, you must agree. I have to try it sometime.

Something is Rotten in the Land of Comics

2008-01-14T21:58:00.000+01:00

I have been a comic aficionado for a long time. I read Courtney Crumrin, The Far Side, The Walking Dead, Captain America and everything in between. I guess it started in my early teens when I started reading manga, especially Masamune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed, Black Magic) and Rumiko Takahashi (Ranma ½, Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku) but also artists like Buichi Terasawa and of course I read Kozure Okami by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima. I sort of drifted away from the manga somewhere around the time when Quake, booze, ladies and rock 'n' roll became more interesting, although I did read Sandman and a few other comics an adolescent goth kid is expected to like. However, I rediscovered comics as a pastime a few years into the new millennium, when a large screen and a fast Internet connection led to the possibility of downloading or reading online before buying. Since then I have found quite a lot of fabulous comics on the net which I wish I had discovered sooner, such as Bone, Hellblazer and Preacher, or the ones published online, such as Sluggy Freelance, Dinosaur Comics, Buttercup Festival (RIP), Death to the Extremist (RIP) and many others.

Anyway, my point is, I read a lot of comics nowadays, even though the fact that my happy days as a student are over means I have had to cut down a bit on my reading. However, I have some major issues. The following pertains to US comics in particular, and the reason that I get so irritated by it is that these comics are generally the best ones in other respects. What I am so damn tired of is that most comics geared towards people older than ten years share a few very sucky traits which I will be going to whine about to a greater extent in future posts; extreme emphasis on the female body and T&A in particular (granted, there is quite a high level of exploitation of the male body too, but not to the same extent), blatant and often overtly stupid political references and world-changing events in every damn issue.

I thought I would start my whining about the extreme sexification of comics. A good example (as in an otherwise pretty good comic) would be the 18 issue Emma Frost series released by Marvel, starting in 2003. It is about a young woman coming to terms with her superhuman powers, her dysfunctional family and bits about boys and betrayal, too. It is rated PG+, yet the cover of the first issue (drawn by the very talented Greg Horn) still portrays somebody who, for lack of better words, sort of looks like a sad and expensive prostitute. This is despite the fact that the protagonist in the same issue looks quite different. Let us take a look (for review purposes only, of course, I am not trying to infringe on somebody's copyright here).

Another funny thing is how the Emma Frost in the comic is called "flat-chested" by one of her peers. As you can see in the picture above, she is the girl in the foreground, this is sort of... weird. It further shows a detachment from reality which is even worse than that of the fashion industry, even though its effects are probably much smaller.

In this particular series, the covers, like the one above, suddenly become dramatically better after issue seven, or perhaps I should say more fitting, even though the same artist is drawing them. Not that they all lose their sexual innuendo, but they give some sort of a glimpse of what the comic is about, rather than being nothing more than bait to make people pick up the comic (I could say the same thing about c.

Most comics are also rife with pretty stupid things that show that the authors are not entirely in touch with reality or do not care. Granted, they usually portray vividly imaginative scenarios, but in those cases where they are supposed to show another version of the "real world" as we know it, they often miss such obvious things like how a man's suit or shirt is buttoned (that is, the button is sewn onto the right side, not the left) or how a certain group of people generally behave. For instance, here is a very good example:

Who the hell wants something sewn by starving Cambodians in sweatshops if they are as rich as this family is portrayed to be? They could, and would, know good tailors.

The list of stuff that irritates me goes on and on and on, but then I am quite the whiny type. However, the sexualisation of almost all females except the "extreme nerd" and similar characters sort of bothers me, for real. Even though I do not call myself "feminist" (though I have heard that one has to, on threat of being labeled a fascist misogynist). Because I think that comics can play an important role in the shaping of a young person's (generally male in this case) mind, just like parents, computer games and literature. Of course, I am not advocating censorship here, and I suppose that hot and sexy comics have their place in the world - I just wonder why such a large amount of the mainstream comics have to be like that (I suppose the answer is that they sell much better). I sort of think that the artist should spend at least a few minutes to consider how they would like it if their daughter got silicone implants the size of her head, wore a thong and did sexy posing on the street all the time. Probably not att all, but you never know with comic artists.

Nine Lives

2008-01-11T00:38:00.000+01:00

One more shopping update (even less money in my wallet...) and then I will move on to something pertinent.

New coat from the J. Lindeberg store in Sturegallerian. I managed to haggle a bit since they had two of (what I guess was) three sizes left, and my friend Jonny had bought the other one. Ergo, they had some real trouble selling these, which is not so strange given the rather hefty price tag and the fact that it will look utter shite on anybody shorter than, say, 195 cm. I know my upper body looks a bit long, but it really is not, I should probably just refrain from buttoning the lowest button. Jonny told me he would have to kill me if I got the same coat, so I guess he has to now. Never mind that we have some other identical clothes, bought both knowingly and unknowingly.

They still have the rather tight size 50 (US size 40) in the store. Go buy it if you are in Stockholm, it rocks!

My friend Anton wanted to get into the fray. He got this snazzy Diesel item. Of course it was on sale, we are such cheapskates, both of us.

This nice shirty thing is from a small Swedish brand called Nine Lives. Most of their stuff looks really good, and it is not exactly horribly expensive. Found at Focus on Nybrogatan.

This is a pretty deco drawing of Fritz Kreisler drawn by a relative of mine a very long time ago. If you like violinists, which Mr Kreisler was, give him a listen!

Finally, I finished the above book. The ending was very much like Halo 2 or Crysis. That is, a clean cut right in the middle of the action. Granted, the book's nature allowed or rather required that to happen in some way, but it was a bit too sudden for my taste, so I felt robbed of a conclusion. Still, a good read! Now, I will proceed to the next Murakami book in my pile.

Hello Pig

2008-01-09T19:02:00.000+01:00

During the last 24 hours, I slept about 15. I cannot really remember the last time I slept that much, but I guess it helped, because I sure feel a lot better now. Good enough to to post of a lot of rather meaningless pictures and an outfit of the day and yesterday.

Monday
Jacket: Vivienne Westwood
Shirt: Vivienne Westwood
Jeans: Versace
Drenching in sweat: A tour to IKEA

Today
Gas mask: Soviet, mid-80s (you can get a similar one here, for instance, though I have no idea why anybody would buy one)

Today
Shirt: Pour (I just got it at the NK after-Christmas sale!)
T-shirt: Dinosaur Comics (you can still get it, and you can read the comics for free - go do it for some serious awesome!)
Jeans: Tiger (selvage found new for a pittance at a second-hand store, tags still attached)
Socks: H&M (every time H&M sell chequered socks I buy two pairs, and every time they sell out in a few days and I lament the fact that I bought too few, especially since their quality is apecrap)

That is the very beginning of my new painting in the background, by the way.

A brochure from a company presentation at the SSE by the Rothschild investment bank. As you can see, I took relevant notes. Additionally, the MD making the presentation was one of rather few people in the IBD business (at least doing company presentations) whom I was instantly impressed by.

These are some Fuji brand condoms I bought in China. For very obvious reasons, I have never used them, and I never will. Really, why are they called DAMAGE? I guess they contain gunpowder or something.

I looked after my friend's cats for a few days this Christmas, so he got me some stuff from his China trip. Among them - this happy pig!

Gorbachev's Tank

2008-01-09T02:22:00.000+01:00

I just went out and got myself a bunch of art supplies. Easel, a bunch of acrylic colours (the only stuff I had left from last time was a pint each of red and black), brushes, the works. I just started on a painting which looks sort of like someone has regurgitated a mixture of absinthe and chocolate. It is supposed to be a forest, but firstly it is not yet finished and secondly I am probably the worst painter in the world. I am far too lazy to use different brushes, and I resent having to clean the brush, which leads to a lot of crappage. In a few years, this will hopefully be seen as a facet of my beautiful genius. I will, of course, keep you posted as regards my career as an artist.

I am haunted by some sort of sickness this week, and as always when I have a sickness that involves fever or fits of shivering, my dreams have been stranger than usual - I even had a nightmare!

I guess I am one of rather few people who almost never has nightmares, but at around 5 a.m. Monday morning, I woke up in a sweat from a dream of some sort of snake telepathically pulling me into a tv screen. Not that I usually fear snakes at all, so it was sort of weird. I will admit, though, that a snake pulling me into a tv would freak me out in real life as well, but not moreso than a badger trying to pull me into a toolshed or an egret pulling me into an episode of Frasier. I also fell asleep on the couch this evening, sleeping for more than three hours (which is so not me - I only sleep at night, in my bed) and dreaming of airplane restrooms in some sort of emergency situation and educating an acquaintance about the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. When I related this to her as I woke up, she asked "Who the hell is that?" so I had to repeat the process - how tedious! I remember having one fact wrong in the dream although all the others were spot on, and that was that I said that Yeltsin was riding Gorbachev's tank. Then I dreamed of a crying old lady in clown makeup, lamenting that her dog had just been run over by a train, so we sang about 40 things to do with a dead dog. Very odd. I hate having a fever.

Back to reality: The book Cowboy Angels which I am currently reading is one of the best, how shall I put it, stories about men doing things together. A Tom Clancy-esqe action-packed novel about covert ops and guns, that is. Plus a bit of time and space travelling. The difference is that Cowboy Angels is one of those books I found quite hard to put down. I am almost finished with it, and I must admit I was a bit disappointed by a few details, but all in all it is an essential read for those who want a few hundred pages of Adventurous Male Story.

Fighting Fire with Tamron and Other Stories

2008-01-02T00:11:00.000+01:00

I had some more pictures lying around on my computer.

These are a few shots I took a few days ago with my Tamron 90mm macro lens to see whether fire was an interesting photography subject. Sort of, but I liked the ashes better.

This is a collection of Swedish glögg (glühwein) bottles which I took the liberty of eternalizing when I was babysitting Nisse the cat. In addition to its regular line, the largest glögg label in Sweden, Blossa, makes a "special" (and limited) glögg every year with a new, unique taste and a bottle to match. They might not be the most beautifully designed bottles in the world, but I still sort of like them. I like the cat too.

Yes, a brand manager somewhere in the world thought that "Happy Time" would be the perfect name for a white, liquid soap. What ever will they think of next? My guess: Semen.

Black Celebration

2008-01-01T21:44:00.001+01:00

Another year, another new year's celebration at Ambra's house. We managed to get about as drunk as usual.

Bacon Hat

2007-12-30T00:15:00.000+01:00

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

2007-12-18T14:09:00.000+01:00

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

2007-12-11T10:03:00.001+01:00

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

2007-11-18T20:45:00.000+01:00

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

2007-10-23T19:48:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-23T19:32:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-23T18:16:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-22T09:37:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-18T00:37:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-10T21:50:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-03T22:57:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-30T22:22:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-02T23:07:00.000+02:00

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

2007-08-29T20:50:00.000+02:00

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

2007-08-23T22:57:00.000+02:00

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

2007-08-19T22:52:00.000+02:00

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.

Real Estate Ants

2007-08-13T11:37:00.000+02:00

I have now had my (hopefully) last exam ever. Last, unless I someday decide I would like to become a doctor or I feel like studying for studying's sake. Anyway, the subject was real estate finance, and it makes me a wee bit uncomfortable. Studying (basic) chemistry or physics is ok, because it tells what matter will and will not do. Studying economics and statistics is worse to me, because it says what people in aggregate will and will not do. I prefer believing in free will and that the human mind cannot be so easily predicted, actions of human groups modelled like those of ants. Alas, that can be pretty hard.

Statistics in themselves have always been a bit counter-intuitive to me, despite the fact that I have studied the subject quite a lot. Something inside me says that rolling a dice six times should be equally likely to give an average of 1 as one of 3.5. On the other hand, something inside me has always wondered why left and right are inverted in a mirror, but not up and down.

Something inside me might be a little bit daft, or maybe those Machine Elf Gods that people who trip on DMT report seeing are having a little joke at my expense. You never know.

The High Priests of the Covenant of Arch-traitors

2007-08-03T20:47:00.000+02:00

Alright, I have had the worst tech experiences ever recently. I thought I had seen it all over the years, but apparently not.

The MacBook Pro I got for work suffered from a hinge which does not go back far enough. Since I am rather tall, this makes it impossible for me to use it comfortably on a table in front of me without using external mouse and keyboard. Another MacBook Pro owner told me that this is common, and the angle is different for different batches of hinges. When he made a fuzz about it, the retailer told him to wait a bit so that the hinge production stabilizes or some such bullshit. Furthermore, the screen is a wee bit flickery, and has some kind of a white spot which is not even a proper dead pixel. Oh, the enter key was all wobbly too. The store where I bought the computer was nice enough to replace the keyboard, so now I have one with a brand new wobbly enter key. Whoop-de-doo!

Having actually been around since the first Mac was released, even though I was just a wee kid at that time, I am appalled at this complete damn lack of quality control on Apple’s part. With the risk of sounding like an old geezer capable of predicting the weather by means of his swollen knee, the early PowerBooks worked for ages. I had one which was ten years old and ran just fine. My LC worked forever and so did my LC475. I have an SE and an SE/30 in the attic which both work perfectly well twenty years later. Now, both my MacBook Pro and MacBook have various issues. My mother's MacBook has had to have its hard drive replaced twice within its first year on this earth, presumably due to heat issues, as she never even moves it from the desk. Her Mac Mini also failed once or twice. So did her Airport Express, on a hot day when the temperature reached 30 degrees celsius.

Granted, computers have become cheaper and are now more of a perishable good than a durable one, but is it actually worth it for Apple and other producers to have so many faulty units? The shipping alone must cost a fortune, never mind the repairs.

Speaking of that, I saw the funniest ad in a while today. Some assinine picture trying to convey luxury and the catchphrase “Shopping turns up the heat.” This was no Al Goresque message, but it was situated outside fancy Sturegallerian where people certainly do not shop because they must, but because they can. Maybe they should have used some more appropriate wording due to the recent global warming and over-consumerism debate. I would have posted a picture if I could, which brings me to the next point.

My new phone works like an employee in a Soviet factory. That is, slowly if at all. The menus are a pain to navigate, feeling just like surfing the ‘net on a 14k4 modem. This is supposed to be a powerful unit, mind you, yet it performs much, much slower than any other phone I have ever owned. It should have synced with my equally infuriating but infinitely faster MacBook Pro, but Sony Ericsson decided that they will no longer offer the required software for download. Bravo. Just to add another little tidbit; the phone will not sync through a USB cable unless a driver is installed. There is no reason at all to give it this “feature”, so I wonder whether the Sony Ericsson engineers are just horrible, spiteful little goblins, such as those featured in the accounting department in the Dilbert comic.

Furtherdamnmore, I wanted to unlock my old phone to be able to sell it. This, the store clerk at 3 (the operator in question) told me with a straight face, would take SIX WEEKS. The procedure is such that I tell them “I want to unlock!” and they say “Sure, we’ll send you the unlocking code!” However, it takes them six weeks to do so. Do they need to assemble the high priests of the covenant of arch-traitors to summon the code? Do they let sloths carry the letter from Nepal, through perils unimaginable? Or are they just completely incompetent? I honestly have no idea. I get so very tired sometimes.

At least I got a nice tank top.

The Guy Who Drove Me Nuts

2007-08-03T00:50:00.000+02:00

I would be writing something right now about the upcoming presidential election in the United States or my newfound love of the Holland Esquire brand. However, I have a meeting in nine hours and I want some sleep and a little bit of time with my books.

In other news, I got the new Sony Ericsson P1i. For some reason, I never buy anything else than Sony Ericsson phones. It is not that I perceive the brand as "trustworthy", "exclusive" or any such bull. I guess I am their dream customer. Needless to say, buying an advanced phone a mere week after its release is almost bound to end in disappointment. The software is so buggy it could ride dunes! Apart from that, the phone seems great. The next system upgrade will hopefully iron out some of the creases.

I was out partying with this crab. He had the sparkly wine, the cigarette and the chili peanut.

I also found this old mask I once made. It is made mostly out of snake skin, metal and very old computer parts. I was certainly more creative a decade ago.

Ah, the things people do. Especially considering that the car is quite expensive and it is parked in the most upscale area of Stockholm. The man with the mischievous grin is not related to the car - just a friend of mine.

This guy drove me nuts some days ago. He is some kind of night butterfly, and those tend to become pretty sleepy during daytime. Since he would have been crushed if I had opened my door, I had to get him to move somehow, but he simply refused. I had to carefully blow on him so that he finally crawled out of harm's way and fell asleep in a corner instead. I cannot for the life of me understand how these creatures survive.

Kafka didn't have a lot of fun either

2007-07-25T01:40:00.000+02:00

Having been quite impressed by the Murakami book I mentioned previously, I got one of his novels, Kafka on the Shore. It was actually one of the best books I have read in ages. Granted, it sometimes becomes a bit too... referencish, for lack of a better word, but it was fab anyway. I somehow found it to be a bit of a mix between Coelho's The Alchemist and Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach (I like the former much less than the latter, mind you, but that is another story). However, I guess Murakami is far more intellectual and well-read than I am, and there are likely much more fitting comparisons that can be made. I can even confess that I cannot remember listening to the Beethoven trio mentioned in the book, even though I have doubtlessly heard it at some point in my life.

The book made me think of my old washed-out t-shirt which reads "Kafka didn't have a lot of fun either" and has a stylized picture of him in black and white - much like the classic Che motif but a lot more tasteful. I should probably get a fresh one.

Einen guten Start in die Woche wünsche ich Ihnen

2007-07-16T14:56:00.000+02:00

So my life has taken a bit of an unexpected turn. I am now creative director at a company dealing in net-based psychology - quite far from the investment banking career I was considering. Also, there is a (rather misleading) "director" in my title. Sweet!

I have been reading some great books, too. For instance, I was delighted to find that Neil Gaiman had released a new collection of short stories, Fragile Things. This one was definitely more uneven than his previous collection Smoke and Mirrors, but a few great stories made it well worth the read nonetheless.

I also scoured the thrift stores for used books and found The Queen of Spades by Aleksander Pushkin which was a nice change from the stuff I usually read.

Having previously been quite disappointed by Hanteringen av odöda (loosely: Managing the Undead) by Swedish horror writer John Ajvide Lindqvist, I decided to give his critically acclaimed debut novel Låt den rätte komma in (loosely: Let the Right One Enter) a try. I guess it was worth it, but I got the same sense of half-bakedness. Certain parts of both the story and the writing are great, but others feel no better than some Naruto fanfic. Lindqvist certainly shows potential yet should probably get more feedback before releasing the end product. Speaking of that, I really wonder why so few fiction authors ever release a "2.0" of their books.

However, the most interesting read I have had in a while is Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. I bought it on a whim at the SF Bookstore in Gamla stan. While I was looking through the new releases shelf, I noticed a book with a very nice cover design, so I decided to ask the clerk whether she knew if it was worth reading. I tend to let chance have a chance to influence my reading habits now and then. Either by looking for a book with a nice design, or just buying something by the author next to one of my favourites. Anyway, the clerk told me that this was actually one of her favourite authors, and she continued to sing praise for at least a minute, which I guess was my cue to buy the book. I did, and I did not regret it. The book is filled with strange, wonderful and horrible short stories, ranging from describing strange situations to life stories. This is the first book in quite some time that has, at times, been a bit moving. Highly recommended!

As regards things that move, I really liked the anime film Paprika, same director as Tokyo Godfathers which is also great. Paprika was like a mix of Lain and Spirited Away, and whereas it did not reach the levels of either it was good fun nonetheless.

A completely unrelated matter: eBay Germans make me so happy. Other people's replies I get are usually "yes" or "no" or some measure/price. When I ask Germans, I almost always get replies which include things like "Einen guten Start in die Woche wünsche ich Ihnen" (Loosely: "I wish you a good beginning of the week"). Sure, it might just be formalities, but still!

Midsummer was nice, by the way. The girls raided the closet full of 80's stuff.

Also, I wonder why there are three bridges next to each other, and whether someone lives in the house inbetween them.

Goddesspeed.

The Itch is Back

2007-06-17T15:13:00.000+02:00

It has been a while, to be sure, but today I felt I really needed to publish a bit of absence of content. I now have only one more exam to write, ever. My internship has come and gone, as has summer, apparently. Today is quite a dreary day with incessant raining. Yesterday, however, was much nicer, and the evening was spent with scores of friends, most of whom were bent on getting copiously drunk.

I think we all succeeded.

On another note, Horst is out and about as usual.

So are animals! The peacock screamed at me when I got too close, whereas the duck happily ate out of my hand. The squirrel was mostly silent and aloof.

Running around in the grass is not so bad, either. I love summer.

Now I just need to write that bloody thesis, which I have postponed far too long.

Consumptionism

2007-05-03T00:15:00.000+02:00

Current research: Command & Conquer 3. Never has an RTS game been such fun, except maybe for Dune II and Starcraft, which are both very much like C&C 3.

I am also, slowly, slowly, finishing Lolita. It is one of those books that get better towards the end, but I still maintain that I love Nabokov's style and am bored by the story. I will have to find something else he has produced.

When I was just a little bit drunk, I decided to order a Nintendo Wii. I tried it out last Friday and I was, to say the least, really damn impressed. Not so much by the technology as by the actual implementation, but it was the first time in a while that I was impressed with a game, the game being the Super Monkeyball one with lots of catching fish and fruit.

Furthermore, I have new Andrew MacKenzie shoes which are so bloody great that I intend to put them up for show here, even though I am certainly not striving towards having a fashion blog.

That is all for my consumptionism today.

Sweetpie

2007-04-26T23:56:00.000+02:00

Time, as usual, is a luxury, so I will let some pictures do the talking today.

Some cherry trees bloom stranger than others. I kind of liked this down, down in Kungsträdgården. The pic was taken either on cherry blossom day (last Saturday) or the young turks (probably not Young Turks, though) day (last Sunday), I cannot remember.

Horst (also known as "the harmonica man") was doing some very, very rude gestures and screaming at the top of his lungs at Stureplan a few days ago. Usually he just plays the harmonica at the top of his lungs. The police, apparently miffed by this sudden change in behaviour, confiscated both Horst and his IKEA bag of belongings. He recently tried to sell me a kickbike for €2, and when I declined he biked away. One hand on the bike and one on the harmonica, playing at the top of his lungs.

I bought "sweetpie" at Café Madeleine. It was just as sweet as advertised.

Now, this is what I call street art!

Nothing is sacred, they changed the Guinness can!

I guess that my apprehension is probably a bit unjustified, as the can was likely changed no more than a few years ago because a new marketing executive wanted to leave an impression.

And now, after some Rotari and Timmermans Kriek, it is time for me to sleep, perchance to dream.

Hard Renaissance

2007-04-19T00:40:00.000+02:00

Just to let you know I am still alive, albeit experiencing a bit of a monasterical existence in the office. I will be back in force in early June.

Today, I found a pair of cufflinks that cost €2,500 or so. They had diamonds, emeralds and rubies in chequered patterns, and they were so tacky I fell in love at first sight. Alas, I am far too practical to spend all my savings on such things. Rather, I will hopefully be going to China this summer to drink lots of rum.

I believe there are no interesting sidenotes to be added today. Things are certainly interesting at work, but I will not divulge any details, for obvious reasons. I did finish reading Greg Egan's book Axiomatic, a collection of short stories, of which some were absolutely fantastic and some were just trite. Since he will not publish anything new until May 2008, I thought I might as well buy some sf anthology in the meantime. It is called The Hard SF Renaissance and contains an Egan story and a lot of others. Seems promising.

Toothpaste Stays Striped

2007-03-27T21:35:00.000+02:00

So, I have been working in the investment banking department of a bank here in Stockholm for a week now. It has been rather tiring, although I guess that could be expected. The time I spent in the office was 70 hours or so, which is approximately the workload I had guessed in advance. However, I had not really anticipated how little leisure time that means. I pity the friend who works 100 hour weeks in London, really. I can only imagine.

On another note, I now know how the toothpaste stays striped! Really, is that not funky? I somehow expect a Dinosaur Comics about it. Read Dinosaur Comics. You must.

I now have two months left as an IBD intern. After that I will either have a very nice job and no spare time, or no job and a very nice spare time. Either way, this summer I have a thesis to write and hopefully enough money to go on vacation in distant lands for a week or two.

Smoked Liquorice

2007-03-14T21:17:00.000+01:00

Though it might seem a bit greekish, I was just ambling around Studentpalatset (The Student Palace) for a bit. It is a pretty nice building, but horribly space inefficient. That, and the group study rooms are stale.

It is a bit weird. The latte (with taste of nuts, and price to match) I drank today cost me as much as these books by Dan Andersson, Göran Tunström and C J L Almqvist - authors who are, I believe, not very well-known outside Sweden. Mmm... books! I also got this horrid Versace tie dirt cheap, for the sole purpose of selling it on eBay. It is one of very few Versace ties I have seen that I have really disliked.

A friend of mine got promotional samples of these sugar-free liquorice pastilles. He gave me a batch, because he thought they were a bit iffy. I really liked the "smoked liquorice" (which, strangely enough, tasted just like liquorice that has been smoked), but the "orange peel liquorice" probably came out of the bad end of a monkey.

Time for Exams

2007-03-14T11:22:00.000+01:00

The fact that I am studying for two of my remaining three exams has led to a lack of updates recently. I will, however, make up for it with a few pictures of the Stockholm School of Economics.

Please note that Sweden has not been invaded, there was just a diplomatic event of some sort going on.

In other news, I just finished The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster, and while I really liked it, I was a bit miffed by the ending.

This prompted me to go buy some new books. I came home with Strindberg, Leonov (Леонов), Boye and Nabokov (Набо́ков). Right now, I am reading Lolita, which I like and dislike at the same time. Like, because I really, really like the author's style and the ways in which he describes the protagonist. Dislike, because I find the story in itself rather trite. I picked up the book in Swedish (I found it used for €1) but later found that the original language is actually English, so I might as well have read it untranslated. C'est la vie.

I sat in a classroom studying yesterday, and I rather liked finding this door.

Mmm... Happy coffee!

King Rat! (More Pictures)

2007-03-10T21:55:00.000+01:00

I have been sitting still far too much recently. Studying, working and whatnot. When the sun finally deigned to show itself, I rushed out for a walk.

There is not much winter left, thanks to the above-normal temperatures the last few weeks. The ice flows freely in the Stockholm stream these days, and the birds seem pretty happy.

Swedish youths, however, were not, due to the controversy about the youth house in Copenhagen. To be honest, I have not been following the issue very thoroughly, but it seems like it warranted a demonstration outside NK.

And in the Old Town, close to the Parliament, there was an anti-Guantanamo demonstration. The effect was somewhat marred by the fact that three "prisoners" stood a few metres away, chatting and sipping hot cocoa, their black hoods pulled back.

It is not rare to spot animals in Stockholm, but sometimes they surprise me. I found this one running around the streets of Södermalm in broad daylight, trying to eat a cigarette butt and almost getting hit by cars. The consensus was that it was either a runaway pet or mentally deranged. Either way, I managed to catch it.

It had to live in a paper bag for an hour or so, until we came up with a good solution to our new rat problem.

The solution included me travelling south with the underground train, the tiny animal safe within a box labeled "Spenat 5/3" which we got from a café.

In a suburb of Stockholm, the newly named Spenat (which is Swedish for spinach) seemed rather happy in his/her giant cage, which happened to be lying around. There was eating, drinking, chewing and, after a while, sleeping. Spenat will be taken to a vet sometime next week so that we can assess whether it is some kind of mouse or a baby rat, and whether it carries the bubonic plague or not.

There was partying last night, and the interior of this club (just this corner, though) really looks like it is straight out of a low-budget vampire movie. The get-together for evil people named Vlad, Grocko and Razputinija. It is not, however. It is called Teatron, and it is quite nice at times.

Grisly

2007-03-08T23:22:00.000+01:00

A bit later than most others, I just watched El Laberinto del Fauno (I have no idea where the "Pan" translation comes from) at the movie theatre. It was very good, but not as great as I had expected it to be. I was told it was a bit of a "horror" movie, but really, it was mostly just a bit gory in places. The one exception would be the monster with the hand-eyes (I will not go into deeper detail, for those of you who have not seen it) which was beautiful, grisly and also somehow immediately drew my thoughts to the book Coraline by Neil Gaiman, one of my absolutely favourite short novels of all time. My main gripe with the film in general was that I did not feel the two stories interweaved as naturally as I might have liked them to, but that is rather subjective, seeing as how others have praised it to no end for just the opposite. Well worth seeing, and it reminded me that Spanish is a pretty language.

I also read a comic called The Nightly News, which more or less felt like a sort of terrorist propaganda. It made me just slightly uncomfortable, which I think was its exact goal. "The Voice" goes on about the concentration of power, media conglomerates; mostly the usual "easy reading" politics found in many comics for grown-ups (not "adult" comics, that is) and the solution according to the protagonists (or antagonists, as the case may be) is, firstly at least, to kill journalists. I will have to try to find more issues of it to see what it is really about. Either way, I am very unimpressed with the way they handle (real-world) statistics, especially one about the share price of the company producing Ritalin. I will show you later.

The Damage Done

2007-03-07T19:03:00.000+01:00

Today brought with it the quintessential The Sisters of Mercy-experience. I finally got my The Damage Done / Watch record! I spent far too much money on it, and my only consolation is that I can probably sell it for around the same price, should I later on understand the mind-boggling stupidity of paying a week's wage on a 7" vinyl that will never be touched by the needle. It must be those collector genes activated, much like love can make almost anything seem like a good idea.

There it is, the first single by The Sisters of Mercy, about as old as me and a fairly crappy recording. However, the lyrics were really very good, compared to those of most other bands in general, and for a first single in particular. What irritates me with a lot of bands is the "angsty fifteen year-old" syndrome and/or just plain bad lyrics. In some cases, it is so bad that I cannot even stand listening, even if the singing and music is good. Never with the Sisters, though, especially from Alice onward.

I also went shopping for cheap book sale stuff and came home with a Lena Ackebo book, a story about Jean Paul Gaultier's career and some odd little book about various political factions in Iran.

Lena Ackebo is one of my favourite female cartoonists and, perhaps not surprisingly, one of my favourite cartoonists in general. For some reason, there are either very few women (notable exception: Chynna Clugston) who manage to release good comics to the general public, or I just have a problem appreciating them. Maybe there is a male hegemony in the comics industry, or society brings up boys to be more interested in comics, hence a smaller population of female cartoonists? Anyway, I have no problem at all enjoying Ackebo's comics, much more for her storytelling and structuring than for the art, admittedly. Actually, the art put me off a bit at first, but I have come to appreciate it with time.

This is a picture from the Jean Paul Gaultier book by Colin McDowell. Some of the stuff in it is totally insane, which is really what I like about Gaultier. There were books about most other fancy designers, but apart from the one about Roberto Cavalli, I found none I really wanted.

Oh, and before I forget. I just read the first 22 out of 24 issues of Girls by the Luna brothers, and I have no idea how I have managed to miss it until now. It is a fantastic comic, if you are not put off by rather graphic violence and nudity. These, however are definitely not what makes the comic interesting. Like any good zombie comic (which it is not, but closely resembles) such as The Walking Dead it is all about what people do together and to each other in a time of crisis. Anyway, I really, really suggest you get it now. It is that good.

Another recommendation while I am at it: The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster. Quite strange and not really exciting as such, but I am almost finished with it, and hitherto, I really like it.

The background at present is a modified version of some William Morris design I found on the web. Morris was a 19th century British artist (chiefly within tapestries and textile) whose designs I really love. Google Image Search is great for finding his art, and it is available in numerous museums. He was a poet and a very early socialist writer, too, but I cannot say that I know much about either of those careers.

Meditative State

2007-03-05T22:37:00.000+01:00

Opening my web browser, I was greeted with the customary "how to of the day" RSS feed. The two latest ones are really fabulous; How to Get Your Girlfriend to Play Video Games and How to Make Polymer Clay Cats. I would rather like to find all that polymer clay I have somewhere in the closet (yes really) and make some cats. The last time I fiddled with it was five years ago or so, and I made loads of mushrooms in various shapes and colours.

However, back to the matter at hand - the video games! During the last year, I have actually spent some time playing games, after a hiatus of almost a decade, save for some Xbox and Gamecube now and then. Ever since I realized that I could enter a sort of meditative state while playing Road Rash on my old Sega Megadrive (that is Sega Genesis for you yankees), I have always preferred the games which crave minute control and quick reactions, but can be played with little or no conscious thought. Dawn of War turned out to be such a game, and I played it to such an extent that I actually had to wipe it from disk just because it took to much of my time. Supreme Commander was pretty nice, too, but was marred by just being really ugly. Its retro design did take me back to the days of my youth and games like Sub Battle Simulator, 688 Attack Sub and all the other really nice strategy games which did or did not include subs.

What impressed me the most during the last year, however, was Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Simply because it looked pretty damn good and had such a huge environment to play around with. Shame about the fact that the number of voice actors was so small, and the so called "oblivion gate" missions being almost exactly the same. Still, it was about the only single-player game I have ever felt immersed in in any way. Quite simply/eerily, I did not feel entirely alone playing it.

Right now, however, the only game on my computer is the Polish indie game Soldat, which is like a mix of Counter-Strike and Worms, but more fun. Really, it is hysterically funny, and free/shareware, too. If you for some reason have free time in which you cannot or will not do something worthwhile, you might as well play it. If you prefer non-violence, the (also free) Flash games by Ferry Halim at the Orisinal webpage are fab.

That Proletarian Foot Rocket

2007-03-05T12:01:00.000+01:00

For many years, I have been fascinated by spam. Not so much the spammers or their products, but rather their MegaHAL-esque randomly generated mails. Markov chains or whatever. Below are some of the subject line highlights from my inbox:

That proletarian foot rocket
stunt woman chain reaction
muscular weeknight
bicker melodious
Enter Editing Worm Bitch
Viral Welcome Guest Sign
convenience store
assailant dark grabbed
outside must mind assessing
diagnosis uninhabitable
roots thud
gizzard sore

Some have a certain poetic touch, and some just sound like they are titles of Skinny Puppy songs. To some, both of the above apply.

Sadly, the contents of the mails are seldom as interesting as what the titles hint at.

Update: The magic of the 'net has alerted me to the existence of the Spamusement website.

Escher

2007-03-05T01:05:00.000+01:00

Since I was a little kid, I have always loved the art of Maurits Cornelis Escher, especially the repeating patterns and impossible structures. Rather, I found the impossible structures mind-boggling, and the repeating patterns beautiful. Since I have far too much work right now, I decided that it was a splendid time to start trying to make some repeating patterns of my own. The advent of programs like Illustrator has made it shamefully easy, so I am working on one containing an Illuminati pyramid, a ghost and a squatting witch. It looks pretty funny already, but I will probably have to enlist one of my more artistic friends to flesh out the details of the figures, so to speak. More details when/if it ever sees the bleak light of day.

Speaking of bleak light, I just recalled that the homepage I had a decade ago was called "An Electronic Haven in a World Bereft of Colour". Boy, was I a pretentious little turd back then... On to more pictures!

And here is the Mackintosh brooch in all its glory. I know, it is way girly, but I believe I am man enough to carry it around for a while, anyway.

Mmm, my new book about carpets - Tribal & Village Rugs. It contains a plethora of patterns and pictures showing a lot of stuff I have never known or cared for, but it sure became interesting when I started reading about it. I will hardly become a carpet collector, though. They are big, cumbersome, and need maintenance.

This is Palestine back in the day, from the book Palästina I bought today. Some time in the early twenties, I believe.

This is a nice picture from the Mackintosh book, by Margaret Macdonald. Why are there so few people today who paint nice stuff like this? It seems everybody paints nude girls on dragons or glues chairs to walls.

Picture Post I

2007-03-04T20:20:00.000+01:00

Today, I will just let my rather crappy camphone speak for itself.

This is what my notes in school have looked like for the past decade. In all honesty, I really am crap at taking notes. They always end up being deranged drawings with no signal to noise ratio whatsoever.

I visited a flea market today, and picked up some great books for about €2/each. Strindberg, Márquez, Slas and Gorkij/Pesjkov, as well as a nice photographic book about Palestine, anno 1925. The latter is full of really nice pictures of the region - city life as well as various scenic views. Whatever one might think about the political situation today, the land was definitely more beautiful then.

I also found a book about Charles Rennie Mackintosh at the annual book sale, and through mysical means I accidentally procured a brooch designed by the same man a few hours later.

Sometimes I just seem to doodle way too much. The big guy is Truth, and his two anorexic kids are Incomprehension and Divestitude. This might be some kind of notes from my studies.

This is an ad campaign by a Swedish labour union, Seko. They seem to have a bit of a problem conveying their message, and this campaign sucks big time. Not because I am against unions in general, but because they demand higher wages for everyone. Sounds more to me like they just demand inflation. However, it would surprise me if that was the case, even though surveys show that people actually become happier if they get a higher wage, even if the inflation eats up the whole increase (as opposed to the wage staying the same, and no inflation).

Is it more equal wages they desire? If so, then just say that, damn it. I also like the middle ad which is a parody of some standard sales campaign and says "Employ 3 - pay for 2", signed "The employers". Seko then writes with really small print at the bottom that "this is our interpretation about what the employers want".

Had I way too much money, I would run the campaign "We are Seko and we will eat your babies! Raaar!"

Glaciers

2007-03-02T20:00:00.000+01:00

On my way home from work, the unusually rapid thawing created very nice glacial ice looking things on the rock by the side of the road. Had I the energy, I would have learned how to publish stuff to my blog from my cellphone, but since I am rather lethargic, the presentation of the ice photos will have to wait until such a time I can be bothered to put that wee memory stick into the card reader.

Right now, I am listening to the Pulsedriver cover of that old Kim Wilde song Cambodia, which is pretty nice even though it is a bit too much of a dance floor anthem for my taste. The Apoptygma Berzerk cover is a tad better.

On the whole, I am a bit afraid for my music taste, since it consists of just a select few bands, and I hardly bother to listen to anything new. I am scared that I might be growing old. On the other hand, the bands I do listen to are at least somewhat diverse. From Velvet Underground and The Sisters of Mercy to Robotiko Rejekto, John B, Tony Joe White, Black Sabbath, Instant Remedy, Future Sound of London, Current 93 and Master Blaster. Then there are the bands that I love but that I for some reason never listen to, such as Einstürzende Neubauten and Legendary Pink Dots.

Overall most played on the iPod right now are Mao Tse Tung Experience and Madrugada, though. Regarding the latter, I spent half a day walking through London listening mainly to Madrugada's The Kids are on High Street, which is probably one of the best songs ever. Pity they are on one of the big labels.

Cardboard Box Coffee

2007-03-02T12:55:00.000+01:00

Being at work, one of the things I like the most is the industial foodstuff they provide us, free of charge. Today, I found a bucket (!) of almond cookies, which tasted as stale as cookies in buckets can be expected to. I also drank stale cardboard-ish coffee, procured from the machine that one of my co-workers shuns. My life started long after the second world war ended, and surrogate coffee disappeared into the mists of time, but I think this is not far from the taste. And still, I rather prefer it (in small doses) to my go fasta red Nespresso machine at home. It is not like I do not appreciate good food or good coffee, but I really somehow like the cheapo stuff here. Whereas some people are drawn to the aesthetics of fascism, I am drawn to the foodstuffs of communism.

Well, not really.

This weekend will bear with it a damn lot of work for me. In addition to studying for two of my three last exams, I will also be spending time on cutting and producing a movie for the benefit of kids in India. Basically, what I do is make films about various charities in India which will make the moneyfolks in Europe open up their wallets to give these kids a proper education.

I think it is quite a worthwhile way to spend my free time. It can cost as little as something like $10 to teach a kid in the slums of Delhi or Mumbai to read and write. Now, that is what I call value for money!

Speaking of cardboard, try to find the song Cardboard Box City by Levellers (or let the magic of the 'net provide you with a copy), for it is damn good.

Comics

2007-03-02T00:47:00.000+01:00

Rigt now, I am watching some kind of horrendous anime called DearS. The English dubbing is awful and so is the original Japanese voicetrack. Add to that stupid sex jokes and that typical absence of actual animation, and it is just like so many other bad anime series out there. I want more Miyazaki, or, lacking that talent and budget, at least more stuff like Lain, Witch Hunter Robin, Wolf's Rain, Haibane Renmei, Last Exile... Talent! Hello?

You may take those implicit recommendations at face value, the above series are really very good, especially Lain.

And now I turned dear DearS off.

Speaking of drawings, I generally prefer them sitting still, except when it is a cheap money-saving trick. That is, I like comics, even though the word is so strange nowadays, what with most comics being full of death and despair. Anyway, in the last few years, I have read through such a shitload of comics that I am a bit ashamed of myself. I could have learned a new language or raised children - maybe even saved the world or something. But no, I have been reading all the Dark Horse and Vertigo stuff, plus a lot of other comics of the same ilk. I cannot say I have not enjoyed it, though, even if some of them were really a waste of time. I mean, stuff like Preacher, Black Hole, Y the Last Man, the Vertigo Pop miniseries are positively brilliant whereas comics such as Spawn are rather tedious in the long run. Maybe, however, the authors did not intend for someone to read 200-ish issues in three days.

Anyway, the recommendations from last week's reading are I Paparazzi, WE3, Tell Me Dark, Tattered Banners and Seaguy. They are good to a rather varying degree, with the last two being discordianismly absurd, the first nightmarishly absurd and the
other two being horrible tales with comparatively happy endings, which I happen to like.

Welcome

2007-03-02T00:33:00.000+01:00

It would seem that I have, perhaps against better knowing, started a blog again. My last one was five, six years ago or so, and I recall there being angst and grinding of teeth with getting it to work properly. Now that blogging is in fashion, everything seems to be quite a lot easier, what with the standardized interface, all the "web 2.0" bits and the fancy formatting being just so much easier. Since I mainly want to spew whiny words, I guess this blog will not differ so much from the last one.

Uppland is a region in Sweden, in which the glorious capital - Stockholm - is situated. It is also pretty close to the name of a pretty bad, as I recall it, record (or maybe it was the band itself?) with a rather good-looking sleeve which I listened to a very long time ago. It is a mystery why I decided that Uppland would be a good name for a blog, but it might just have something to do with all nice blog URL:s already having been taken..

This blog, as already mentioned, will be mostly whiny. I will, however, try to serve some cheese with the whine.

For now, I implore you to go visit zombo.com, which is an old favourite of mine, as well as look at some Louis Wain paintings and drawings. I have, perhaps, a bit of a thing for insanity.