Cats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eggs

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

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

Two eggs.

Angry, Bricked-in

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

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

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

Invasion of the Gay Garden Gnomes

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


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


Yet we stay happy, content and well-nourished.


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

Anyway.

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

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

Jinx

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

How the West was Lost

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

This is insane.

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

This is insane.

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

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

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


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

State of the Union on the Far Side of the Sea

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

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

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

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

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

Octopus Angel

It is now hat season!


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fall Out

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

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

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

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

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

Post 93

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

Recent stuff I like and dislike:

Dislike: True Blood

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


Like: After the Quake

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

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


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

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

You Will Find Me if You Want Me in the Harbour

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

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

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


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

Golden Bird to Flesh-Textured Marble

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

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

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

Armania

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

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

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

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

Done

Moving: done.


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuckup Fixed

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

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

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

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

Horror Spory

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

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

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

After Dark

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

This is what we do when the sunlight fades:

Being hugged by the fiancée

The beauty of lazily flapping angels

Being hugged by the fiancée II

Fixing the hairdo with some sort of hand moistening lotion

Public Morals Committee

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

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

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