War-knitting

It has been quite a while, but my business has been great. Apart from having a full-time job, I have also been working quite a lot on my thesis and searching for an apartment. The latter task, I am happy to say, is finished. I found a very nice two-room apartment in central Stockholm, in a house built in the late 1920s. It has a fireplace, a balcony and is damn nice. The problem, as expected, is that it will cost me a bloody fortune to live there.


Somebody has knitted here. I have no idea whether they made the whole thing right there, or if only the finishing touches were made at the site.


This is probably one of the best pictures I have ever taken. I am sure you will agree.


When taking a walk with a friend, I found this nice plank. It says "WE WALK SLOWLY" and I have no idea what it means.


Yes, I have been drinking again, as is painfully apparent.

I found The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to be the best Murakami book as of yet. Not only was it rock-solid through the whole story, but it also had an ending I did not dislike. I also read Hard-Boiled Wonderland, but it was really nowhere near as good. A Wild Sheep Chase which I am reading at present seems to be more like the former, which makes me pretty happy.

I took a pause in my Murakami marathon these last few days to read the latest Terry Pratchett book, Making Money. I found it to be very easy to read, but a little bit shallow. Of course, we are talking Pratchett here, and his books always tend to be rather shallow, but in a good way. Lots of archtypes and a few real characters, simple but effective stories, wonderful to read. It is not exactly a wonder why Homer (or whoever wrote those books) is such a famous guy. However, Making Money was somehow a little bit more shallow than usual. Only the main protagonist is given any character at all. Everybody else is just a cardboard cutout. Still a very good read, but I would have expected a wee bit more.

Today, I was a bit ambitious and went to Kulturhuset where I ambled around for a bit and looked at Martin Parr and Nobuyoshi Araki photo exhibitions. Parr was rather interesting. No fantastic pictures, no great art as such. However, he seems to be very gifted when it comes to capturing the spirit of a time and/or place, which sometimes counts for a lot more than the perfect composition. Araki seemed to like women who are tied up and have plastic lizards stuffed up their reproductive organs. It was a little silly, but there were some fantastic pictures of flowers and his beloved cat which made me forgive the rather tedious bondage bits.

A friend, a flower, a wild strawberry

Hey, I am all grown up, bitter and artsy. Since I have a camera, everything must now be in black and white. Also, I am honestly trying to learn to like jazz of the Bix Beiderbecke kind, but it is not going too well. I always switch to VNV Nation or Einstürzende Neubauten after five minutes.

I found a friend, a flower, a wild strawberry (which was not so wild since it grew on a balcony, so I would call it a tame strawberry, but then I would have a hard time conveying the fact that it is one of those small strawberries, Fragaria vesca, which we Swedes call smultron), a sunglasses-wearing child in a church holding a fish in front of the altar (oh, the symbolism) and a big clay butt next to flowers.







I also found I could fry some Quorn in lots of Kikkoman soy and white rice vinegar, add various vegetables and then throw in a bunch of udon noodles. Needless to say, this is a damn tasty dish which I fear I may get tired of very soon if I continue to make it all the time.

I also finished reading Dance Dance Dance which I felt was strangely familiar at times, I cannot really place it, but it was very much like some other book I read a long time ago. It also bore a passing resemblance to Lolita, which is not a bad thing. All in all I liked Kafka on the Shore a bit better, though. Of course, I have already started on my next Murakami book - The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - which hitherto is decidly better than both of the above. That might change though. The ending is so often the crucial part. The funny thing is that The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is certainly feeling eerily pertinent right now.

Dance Dance Dance

So I got the result from my final exam back yesterday, and it was positive enough. A pass, nothing more, but it still means I only have to finish my thesis now, and I will officially be a Master of Science. I like that title - it reminds me of He-Man.


Also, despite my recent horrible experiences with all things electronic but perhaps because of my sour mood caused by my recent break-up among other things, I decided to spend all my remaining cash on a Canon EOS 400D. I had the previous model in the series, the 350D, some time back, but was forced to sell it as I was a bit shorter on cash than I liked. Anyway, I got a 50mm 1.8 lens of questionable build quality which takes great pictures, a decent flash, a 55-200mm zoom and some other stuff, so now I will spend my days trying to freeze the sky. As above.


I also bought this fabulous white shirt with black cuffs, collar and buttons. It is very, very nice, and I wonder why I have never made one like that. Yesterday, I read a bit more than half of Murakami's Dance Dance Dance, which was fantastic until about where I am now, but now it is not more than great. Still great, mind you, but I guess my expectations are far too high for the poor Mr. Murakami to be able to deliver all the time.

BioShit

For the first time in ages, since I mostly play Wii and simple web games, I was actually considering going to the store to shell out for a PC game, BioShock in this case, which looks absolutely fantabulous. I had my €45 ready and willing for the Swedish launch tomorrow - and then I learned that this (offline!) game requires online activation. Do these people understand nothing? The crackers will crack, the couriers will cour (?), the "Scene" will be lit with industrial light and magic with the result that everyone will be downloading it via BitTorrent within a week, anyway. The only thing that sort of practice does is put people off from buying BioShock. Pity. It seems to be great fun, and I liked the randian slant to the game. Some Half-Life game I got quite a while ago will stay my latest acquisition for some time to come, I guess.

In other news, I am nowadays utterly girlfriend-less, so I went to a bookstore and got Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Dance Dance Dance (I just picked them randomly from the books available). All by Haruki Murakami, whose writing I simply love. Equally randomly, I decided to start with Dance Dance Dance. Hitherto, it seems as great as I expected it to be.

I have recently been reading quite a lot of books, and this - combined with a very strange semi-hallucinatory awakening this morning within which I had the main theme of a story presented to me by myself to the tones of Last Train to Trancentral - led me to feel the uncontrollable urge to start sketching the rough outlines of a short story myself. I have no idea whether it will just end up in the trash like all my other attempts at writing, but this is the first time I have actually been able to develop the protagonist (or antagonist, as it were) to an extent with which I am satisfied.

She's in Parties

Apart from crying over all my electronic apparel going haywire for no good reason - the holy electronic udder having exploded in my face as I suckled its flame-retardant teats, as it were - I have been to parties. Some are good, and some are not.

Yesterday held one of the former in store. Sorry about the picture quality - another feature of the P1i phone of course. The party started innocently enough, but it might have been the ouzo and the gyoza I brought with me, like a harbinger of wailing doom, that made everyone rummage through the wardrobes to find all sorts of fancy dress. We also destroyed three bananas, did the Benny Hill dance several times and tried vacuuming everything we could reach, including a mouth.

Real Estate Ants

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

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

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

The High Priests of the Covenant of Arch-traitors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least I got a nice tank top.

The Guy Who Drove Me Nuts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kafka didn't have a lot of fun either

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

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

Einen guten Start in die Woche wünsche ich Ihnen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goddesspeed.

The Itch is Back

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

I think we all succeeded.

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



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

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

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

Consumptionism

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

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

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

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

That is all for my consumptionism today.

Sweetpie

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

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

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

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

Now, this is what I call street art!

Nothing is sacred, they changed the Guinness can!

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

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

Hard Renaissance

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

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

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

Toothpaste Stays Striped

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

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

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

Smoked Liquorice

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

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

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

Time for Exams

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








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

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

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

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

Mmm... Happy coffee!