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.

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

Embarrassment of a Solar Empire

I had another "saying stupid things on national television" episode today. I am to be in some sort of fashion show hosted by Hanna on Z TV, aired tomorrow, and I sort of dressed up in tight, dark blue jeans, a turquoise dress, a horrible grey sweater and a shabby Burberry coat. Then I talked about how this style was inspired by "rural nobility" (sic!). All in all, I was almost as silly as the time when I appeared as a post-apocalyptic techno rocker (speaking of which - only a few months left 'til Fallout 3 - woo!!!).


I also met a very nice hobo. Hanna gave him some cigarettes and he talked about his homeless life for a while, relating to us a story about how he had fallen asleep this weekend, drunk as hell, outside a local theatre. Some women had apparently painted his nails and put on lipstick while he was sleeping, which would have been a so-so prank, even had they been his friends or something. Doing it to people on the edge of society, however, is just fucked up.

He admitted to stealing the yucca palm leaves he wore as ears, or horns, I dunno. He justified it with a simple "the yucca palm has 500 leaves, and new ones will grow!" I thought it was pretty poetic.

Yesterday evening was spent testing Sins of a Solar Empire. It is a new space strategy game rather devoid of unique ideas but with a lot of things going for it like the sheer scale in combination with possibilities for micromanagement, nice graphics and a generally nice feel to it. Sort of like Supreme Commander in space.

At first, I felt I was in love. However, on the smallest map, it took me about three hours to corner the enemy civilization, not even defeating it. If a casual game lasts at least half a day, how are people without unlimited quantities of time supposed to play it? However, problems quickly became apparent, such as the AI being a bit retarded, the scout ships being nigh impossible to destroy in time, the pirate raids becoming very tedious, and so on. And, there is no campaign in the game, only skirmish. Come on! I like playing campaigns, even if they are badly written and rather short. They give me some sort of purpose and motivation for playing, instead of just taking some short "Eurasia and Oceania have always been at war" at face value. Anyway, I will not be buying this unless they come out with some (a lot of) fixes.

Scratch that. I will not be buying it, because if its crappy aspects get fixed, I will spend far, far too many hours playing it.

Powder

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


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

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

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

Fleshed Out

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

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

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.

Visiting the Dolphin Hotel

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

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.

BioShit

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.

Meditative State

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.