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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
