Thursday, September 4, 2008

Emperors and Mummies

Me and the Nightflyer watched The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor last night. It was a pretty funny movie, but no masterpiece. I did realize something, though, that hadn't struck me before. Not to spoil too much of the movie, but there are Yetis in it. What I hadn't realized before was that Yetis are basically just men who transcended the boundaries of manliness and emerged with more muscle than Arnold and manly enough to not only ignore ice and snow, but also manly enough to grow full-body beards.
Awesome.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Computers and The Future

Yo guys, I have a Barcode, that's how awesome I am! I'm ready for the future and our upcoming computerized, robotic society, oh yeah.
I bet you guys don't have your own barcodes. When the computers take over, I'll be the among the first to be processed, and so it's only natural that I'll be given some high position or other, like Director in Chief of Human Public Relations or something similar.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Wyatt Earp and Tombstone.

I watched Wyatt Earp last night, and it feels natural to compare it to Tombstone, seeing as how they both tell parts of the same story. On the first glance, Tombstone seems like the better movie. It's got Sam Elliot as Virgil and some rather proper mustaches in it. It's also in most areas the most aesthetically pleasing of the pair, being slightly less gritty, and having given the story a 'shave', if you'll excuse the pun.
Kurt Russel also does the, in my eyes, cooler interpretation of Wyatt Earp himself. While having less personality, on account of less backstory, he still somehow looks better. This might be because most of the lines in Wyatt Earp were boring and less aesthetic. Also, adversaries in Tombstone have actual personalities. Well, not all of them, since they come by the bucketload, but at least there's Curly Bill Brocius, Johnny Ringo and Ike Clanton. They are all in Wyatt Earp, but they have no memorable lines whatsoever, and since they are all so grubby and shabby, I found it hard to tell one from the other. Wyatt Earp does have Jayne, though, which is a merit. Or, well, it's got Adam Baldwin playing a cowboy, which is pretty much as close to Jayne as you can get.
Now, on to the most important aspect of both films, as well as the comparison.

I'm not sure why, it might be historical accuracy or it might be that both directors harbor secret homosexual crushes, but it seems somehow impossible to make a movie about Wyatt Earp without having John Henry 'Doc' Holliday show up and immediately steal the show.
In Wyatt Earp, Dennis Quaid (How the hell is that pronounced?) plays the part. I have been completely unable to find a proper picture of the guy in that role, which is strange, since he looks Fucking Awesome.
This one will have to do, with Holliday on the right (And Costner looking like an uncharismatic sack of potatoes with a mustache). Great beard/stache-combo. This Holliday is sightly more serious than the other, both looking and sounding more dangerous.
In Tombstone, the role is played by Val Kilmer. You know, the dude that sucked as Batman. He. Is. Awesome. While looking less awesome than Quaid, the Holliday he shows us is by far the greatest. Less serious, more fun.

Both Hollidays have a few memorable lines, and it's rather hard to pick a favorite in that department. Kilmer's Holliday is a tad biased towards one-liners.
Doc Quaid:
"Dave Rutabaugh is an ignorant scoundrel! I disapprove of his very existence. I considered ending it myself on several occasions but self-control got the better of me."
Doc Kilmer:
"Look, darling, it's Johnny Ringo. The deadliest pistoleer since Wild Bill, they say. What do you think, darling? Should I hate him? There's just something about him. Something around the eyes, I don't know, reminds me of... me. No. I'm sure of it, I hate him."

Well, all in all, I'd say Tombstone is the best of the two. There is little to praise in Wyatt Earp apart from Doc Quaid, but he is overshadowed by Doc Kilmer anyway, so it's somewhat of a moot point.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Phonecalls and Manliness.

I had another realization yesterday, which I naturally forgot all about as soon as I actually started writing, four or five minutes later (See what I mean about the Alzheimer's?).
When I was a kid, I always thought young people bananaphoned their boyfriends or girlfriends all the time simply because they were young, and that as you grew up, you'd stop doing it, unless you had a reason for calling (Like "Could you buy milk on the way home" or some such grown-up concern).
What I've realized, though, is that you don't stop calling your girlfriend or boyfriend when you grow up, you simply stop calling them when you live together. My parents both call their respective boyfriend and girlfriend all the time now, and they're hardly what one might call young anymore, they just don't live with them.
Funny how I never thought about that before.

I bought a mosquito-bite-zapper-thing today. It's a small green tube with a button at one end and lightning at the other, and it's apparently supposed to take away mosquito-bites if you electrocute yourself enough. Now, I don't know about you guys, but to me that sounds a hell of a lot more manly than some wimpy ointment. Now I just need to figure out a way to make the stream of Lightning more constant, and also improve the reach a bit. Then I'll put it in a glove and wear a black hood and we can all rule the galaxy together.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Important Realizations. And Stuff.

I've come to a realization today.
I've realized that keeping a blog isn't just a good way to keep my friends updated on what I've been doing and what's been going through my mind. (Which, by the way, probably doesn't work very well anyway, since I'd suppose most people stopped checking this page five or six months ago, when I stopped writing. EDIT: Realized it's actually eight months since I last posted.)
My point is, It's also a good way to keep myself updated on what I've been doing, and what went through my mind at any given point before, say, last Thursday.
So, when I'm fifty or so, I can sit there with my fat beer-tummy (well, probably not beer, but whatever, you get my point), my long, wise beard and my Alzheimer's and read this, and remember all the glory-days of my youth.
(See how nicely this realization goes together with my wisdom-theme? Oh yeah.)

So, on to the actual Alzheimer's Reminders (AR.. I think I'm going to keep that term, I have a feeling it'll come in handy..)
A lot of this summer has been spent in Karlstad. Some at the Nightflyer's parents, some at Björn's place, and a lot of it at Rik's house. Rather too much, it would seem. Most of it was pretty awesome though. We played a lot of Resident Evil 4 at Björn's, and I decided that I wanted it for my PC, because I hate trying to aim without a mouse. (Then I went home, and realized that it didn't have mouse-support without mods anyway. I just don't get some developers)
So, after I got home from there, I went to visit my mother, which was nice. We played a lot of Die Siedler von Catan, which is an awesome game. I'll try to get one of my own so I can make you guys play it.
At night, I also played a lot of Caesar III. Haven't played that game since.. Fifth grade or so. It was awesome. Watching tons of people move into a desert made of empty and fire, just to have their house catch fire and burn them all alive is one of the most awesome experiments I've ever made on any AI. Or maybe it was just late. It was Awesome, anyway.
Then it started raining a lot, and my sister became ill (She had been at a camp in Rättvik) so I went home to Stockholm. And that's pretty much where I am now.

As for the future, I still don't know where I'm supposed to be, exactly, to start school or when I'm supposed to go there. They tell me I'll find out sometime in the middle of this month. So I'll see it when I get back home, by the 19th or so. Then I have to move lots of stuff from here to our new apartment, it'll be fun when it's all done.

Also, a friend of mine just got married, and his kid (~Linux Möller) will be a year in a few months. That kind of responsibility feels a bit scary, since all I have to worry about is handing in assignments in time, and get rent-money to Rik. Not terribly demanding, by the looks of it.

Now I'm going to watch all the Zero Punctuation I've missed. Over and out.

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Malta. And Spirits.

Let me just get something off my chest.
During this past week, I have seen more of those Fucking Smiling Peugeots than I have ever seen before in my life! Ever! They love the Fucking Things!
Ah, that's better, thank you.
Now, on to the more important stuff.

Welcome to Malta, we apologize for any inconvenience.
This is probably the sign I've seen most during the past week. Since this is hardly the most popular season to go to Malta, most of the interesting historical stuff was closed. Along with a lot of other interesting things. We did get to see quite a few really cool sites, though. The Catacombs of St Paul, which were Awesome, a bunch of random caves, which were awesome as well, something called The Malta Experience, a movie about the history of Malta, stretching back some 7000 years, and a lot of other interesting, and less interesting, things.
However, this was all slightly hampered my the fact that the island of Malta contains the single most complicated road system on the planet. They haven't really invented the roadsign yet, or at least not found out how invaluably practical they are. There are usually one or two points in each town/village/settlement where there are roadsigns, pointing to other towns/villages/settlements nearby (including the entire island, since it's hardly big) but since there are no signs whatsoever on the actual roads, and the roads themselves are hardly straight, it makes the entire island very difficult to navigate. They do have one kind of sign they really do love, though. It says "Diversion. Airport", and there is at the very least twenty or thirty of them in each town/village/settlement, all pointing in different directions. I saw two of them, no more than five yards apart, pointing at each other. Bah.
EDIT: Right, I forgot to mention that, since all of the towns/villages/settlements were fairly close together to begin with, and they have all grown a lot bigger than they once were, it is very difficult to find out where one such town/village/settlement ends, and the next begins, since there aren't any rural areas in between. Just to add to the confusion. Once, when we actually thought we had a pretty good grasp of where we were and where we were heading, we realized we were in a completely different town/village/settlement, six or seven kilometers away. Confusing.

Other than that, the people I was there with (Being my father, his girlfriend, her son Magnus, his friend Mattias, and my friend Carl) were all nice people, even though Magnus and Mattias both had a habit of partying in a slightly different fashion than the people I'm used to, since it usually involved drinking at least half a bottle of rum each before going anywhere. And then they just kept going from there. They spent a lot of money on alcohol, they did. Not as much as they did elsewhere, though.
I have recently found out that I find stripclubs to be highly amusing. Or, rather, I find others going to striclubs and spending frankly embarrassing amounts of money, highly amusing. Since Magnus's girlfriend left him very recently after six years, he and Mattias decided he needed therapy, so they went to a stripclub four or five nights. The amount of money they spent varied, but on two nights, they spent a grand total of about 1300 euro. All in all, they spent between 1500 and 1600 euro, on that stripclub alone. Well, it's their money.
Back to cars for a moment: All taxis on Malta are white, and since there are quite a few Peugeots 306 or so among them, they all reminded me of Taxi. I'm going to have to watch that movie tonight.
Just one final note, since there are quite a lot of
Opuntia on Malta, I was reminded of something I was thinking when we were on Tenerife a bunch of years ago. Anyway, am I the only one wanting to cut one of those apart every time I see them, just to see 1: What they look like inside, and 2: What it would feel like to cut them?
Ehm, anyway.
There are probably other things I should be writing about, but I can't think of any, apart from the Nightflyer, so I won't.