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.

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.

Green Glowing Jesus

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

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!