Nallenon

Americans and Internet Explorer

2011-02-20T18:50:00.006+01:00

Having just found the "Stats"-function on my blog (Shut up >_<) I have learned a few interesting things.
Number one: I have almost ten times as many pageviews from the US as from Sweden (Hello over there).
Number two: 72% of the people who read my blog use Internet Explorer (Go away) and Yahoo Image Search or Bing (Seriously, Stop).
And three: As it turns out, I have about 1400 pageviews on my blog, and ALL OF THEM want to know exactly what Val Kilmer looked like playing Doc Holiday.
Seriously.
That post has 936 pageviews today, followed by a distant second of 22 (That was the post where the Nightflyer and I came out as a couple, so I guess we are about 2.3% as interesting as Val Kilmer playing Doc Holiday) and the photo of of Doc Holiday is, along with the general keyword "Val Kilmer" solely responsible for every single Referring URL to my blog. Every one.
The post is also responsible for virtually all of the Search Keywords to my blog, except "Nallenon.blogspot.com" seven times, and "dota 6.60" twice. What the fuck? "Val Kilmer" has shown up as a search keyword 677 times.

As much as I agree that Doc Holiday is an awesome character and Val Kilmer makes a brilliant representation of that in the movie, I wasn't expecting that post to be the highlight of my Internet career. Oh well, what can you do.

Good and Evil

2010-09-27T14:53:00.003+02:00

In the old days, there were monsters.
Demons hiding in the dark corners of the earth, trolls in the forests, imps, goblins, Fae. Monsters, all. These creatures were evil, and in contrast to them stood humans. Light, goodness. Good is the opposite of evil.
In the old days, there were dark places where the dark things hid.

Today, there are no trolls. No demons, no imps, no goblins. No dark places where the dark things can hide. There are no dark things. We have out-scienced the darkness. There is no longer true evil. All modern evil can be seen from its own point of view, and understood.

What happens when we, as a culture, as a race, have outgrown our fear of the dark? Where does goodness go when there is no more evil? Does the scale shift? Are we less good, now that there is no true evil to balance the scales?

Perhaps we need our Leslie Vernons.

Resident Evil and 3D

2010-09-23T23:15:00.005+02:00

Alright, let me just make one thing clear to you, people who made Resident Evil: Afterlife. If you have, at the end of the last movie, introduced a very large number of clones of the now superpowered protagonist, it is considered a cheap fucking cop out to start the next movie with a short and storywise rather redundant scene in which ten or twelve of them show up to murder some dudes, before blowing them all up, conveniently forgetting that there were another 80 or so, never mention them again and subsequently rob the real one of all her superpowers. If you also forget that she does not have superpowers for the rest of the movie, then you will not only look like incompetent writers, but also tremendously stupid.

Right. As you may have surmised, we went to see the new Resident Evil tonight. It has, as Yahtzee would put it, full 3D up the arse, but I'll get to that later. I had read a few of the reviews printed about this movie, but I rather felt they all missed the point. It seems a bit unfair to mark down a Resident Evil movie by a lot because the story is bad, while also remarking on the great effects and awesome fight-scenes. Story has never been a very strong point in the RE-movie franchise, and they have really only had effects and violence to sell. This one did this pretty well, although it was a bit hampered by the new and improved 3D.

There are of course several situations where people get to hold the idiot ball. Let me list a couple:
1. If you spend time, effort, bullets and a life to get into an armory stocked full of military grade weapons, do not, I repeat, do not leave the room bringing nothing but three pistols, some explosives and one sub-machine gun. Especially not if you are there to get weapons for eight people against a horde of thousands of zombies. Bring automatic weapons for everyone.
2. If you are holding a motivational speech in front of roughly 20 helicopters, each stacked with roughly 20 armed and armored soldiers, and you use the phrase "This will be the fight of your lives", you had better make sure you are not talking about them fighting about a hundred people standing about on top of a cargo ship, if those hundred people have two pistols and a pair of sawn-off shotguns to go around. It will not be the fight of anyone's life. It will not be a fight.

Now, for the 3D aspect. I personally felt that it was nice when it was not doing anything spectacular. I liked it when it was just subtly showing distance between characters in a crowd or some similar neat little effect. Whenever it did it's gimmicky bullshit of making someone point a gun at the audience, just so we would remember that we are watching a 3D movie, I felt that it broke the immersion. Even more so when I had to turn my head to look straight at the edge of the screen to make the 3D work properly over there. You don't want to remind people that they are watching this through a medium, you want to immerse people in what you are showing them.
Not to mention the times the 3D just plain didn't work properly, although that was thankfully rather rare. More common was 3D where there was no reason for there to possibly be 3D, like on the monitor of a guy in a security station. How exactly is his job made any easier by the fact that the face of the guy he is talking to is 30 cm further away from his face than the rest of the screen, where all the vital blocks of information is? Why does this feature exist in his workplace?

Right, while we are on the subject of effects: It would actually be nice if there was one single moving organism in the entire movie that was not either 1: One of the few surviving uninfected humans, or 2: A very large boss-type character showing up, fight without splitting it's face open. Seriously, every single zombie did this. They looked a lot like the bloodsuckers from S.T.A.L.K.E.R, which got old really fast. I'm sure there are things doing this in the games, but why couldn't you have some of the normal zombies from the first three movies? What was wrong with them? Did they all die?

Conclusively, I can't say that 3D was worth it, really. It had a few neat, subtle things about it, but the times it didn't work or overworked itself pretty much undid it all by breaking the immersion.

Oh, right, I almost forgot. It was a fun, but pretty strange, touch to have the guy sitting locked up in prison claiming not to be a criminal, and having a fully hatched plan to break out of it, be played by Wentworth Miller.

Boll and Quality?

2010-09-22T00:30:00.006+02:00

Uwe Boll made a good movie?
A good movie by Uwe Boll?
Uwe movie Boll good?
Boll good movie Uwe?
Movie Uwe Good Boll?
...
My mind fell off.

Star Wars Holiday Special and DEATH!

2010-05-22T15:08:00.002+02:00

GAAH! FUCK! EVERYONE MUST DIE! JUST DIE! MAKE IT STOP! SHOOT EVERYTHING!

A Bunny, and All The Time In The World

2010-04-08T15:26:00.008+02:00

(For some reason, hotlinks did not work. No clue why, can't be bothered at the moment, so I'll just leave it like this:)

This Comic:
http://www.prguitarman.com/index.php?id=103

This Game:
http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/bells.htm

That is all.

(No need to thank me, you go on ahead and waste the rest of your day.)

Murderers and Cameras

2010-03-10T23:42:00.004+01:00

Assassin's Creed II update #1:
Just a very small thing, but if anyone does not want one very small aspect of gameplay spoiled, I guess stop reading.

Ubisoft: STOP IT WITH THE FUCKING CAMERA ANGLES!
They add nothing to the game and it's a cheap-ass way to lengthen gameplay by making us do each fucking timed puzzle three fucking times to memorize exactly when the camera is going to lock itself in a corner to give me a useless hint (read "Bat to the face") of where to go next, while simultaneously making sure I Do Not Go There, by changing what my previous "Run straight ahead" command means!

Other than that, the game rocks.

Storygnomes and Payne

2010-02-18T21:55:00.003+01:00

Let me just get this one thing straight with all of you movie-producers who regularly read this blog:
If you take a game and make a movie out of it, and upon looking back at your work realize that you have managed to make the story and the characters worse than they were in the game, you have failed miserably. This is much more evident if the game you took only gives the player three ways to interact with things: Jumping over them in slow-motion, punching buttons/cabinets/doors, or shooting them in the face. How you managed to take this, on the surface rather simplistic premise, and ruin the otherwise actually surprisingly good story, is beyond me.
What was your intention, really? You take an archetypal anti-hero who shoots more or less everyone he sees, while wearing a smug grin and tossing around dark city noir poetry made up on the fly, and make sure he has virtually no discernible personality, who only starts killing people for real after he almost ODs on some superdrug? How is this in any way an improvement?

Christmas and Television

2009-12-24T10:39:00.005+01:00

First of all: Happy ChristmaHannuKwanzaa!
Second: Who the hell watches Two and a half men at six thirty on Christmas Eve?
Isn't that just the most terrible thing you have ever heard?
"Some people do not celebrate Christmas" isn't an excuse either, since it's a terrible show.
It's all just sad.

On the other hand, there is a lot of snow here, and I have taken about a rough million pictures of it all. This little city is surprisingly pretty when one hasn't seen it in a while.

EDIT: Det här måste jag dock säga på Svenska: Varför i hela helvete visas samma Kinesiska ankjävlar i år igen? Vem bryr sig, egentligen, om ett gäng ankor i Kina? Varför är det viktigt, för vårt lands julkänsla, att få se att det finns ett litet gäng ankor i Beijing? Jag förstår det inte alls.
On the plus side of things, Christmasfood was, as always, excellent.

December... And. Stuff.

2009-12-01T00:08:00.002+01:00

Wooo, it's my birthday, yaay.
..Might update this later, in case something worth telling happens.
For now, woooo.

EDIT: There will be an update along shortly, probably.
For now, I just wanted to point out that the Video of the Now feature went away to have intercourse with its own ear, and I locked it in its room for now, until it learned its lesson.

Shakespeare and Nonsense

2009-11-19T17:11:00.004+01:00

Today we were at the Globe Theater and Tate Modern. The Globe Theater is a rather acurate replica of the theater Shakespeare owned and operated in, and it is very impressive. When I say owned, I actually mean "stole", which is one of the coolest things one can do with a building of that size. Very interesting place with a very interesting guided tour. We learned about how the plays were set up and a lot about why the theater looks the way it does.
We also learned about interesting things that the people in the area did to amuse themselves when they weren't at the theater, and I feel I must tell you about some of these things.
The first one consisted of chaining a bear to a pole, setting some dogs on it, and then betting on how quickly the bear would kill the dogs.
Another was to tie a monkey to the back of a horse, and having dogs chase it in a circle, scaring the monkey and making it scream. This was considered hilarious, because apparently monkeys sound like women when they scream.
When the people of the day would get bored of messing with animals, they decided to pick on the poor people instead. So they made what was essentially a big piñata full of fruit, hung it up over some open bit of land, and then threw firecrackers at it until it broke. Poor people where then allowed to go and pick up the fruit. While the richer people threw firecrackers at them. Great fun.
People say that the internet has desensitized us. I don't think that's the case. We desensitized us.

After the Globe, we went to the Tate modern.
The Tate Modern is a gallery of modern art.
I really, really, Really hate modern art.
I could see the point of literaly no things in the entire building.
From what I can understand, modern art relies very heavily on the viewer to see what isn't there, to see beyond the obvious and see the artist's intent. This makes no sense to me either.
What I hate most about modern art isn't the art, it's the community. The fact that, whenever someone does not understand modern art, that person is uneducated or unsophisticated. The idea that they keep trying to justify their creations with artistic sentences.
"Blah blah blah after commiting random acts of violence to random objects the artist reveals a hidden meaning of the objects"
No. You ran over a trombone with a steamroller. Good for you. There is no "hidden meaning" in a trombone that only comes out when you run it over with a steamroller. It is a trombone. An instrument. It was designed to make a certain kind of noise, not to have hidden meanings in it to be steamrolled out.
And I don't care how fancy words you use, you simply cannot justify a video of a naked man in a monkey/mongoloid-mask spasming around and smearing red paint all over himself as art. It is not art, it is bad YouTube.
Modern art simply makes no sense to me, and whenever I actually try to "see beyond the obvious", rather than just be amazed at the stupidity of it all, it makes my head hurt.
Summary: The Tate Modern was the most depressing building I have ever been in. I could have appreciated it a bit more if I had been able to just talk about how amazingly stupid it all is, but whenever anyone said anything about a painting one got angry looks from people around, people who undoubtebly thought they were better than me because they could understand why an empty canvas with a knifewound in it, or some very large circles of runny red paint on a white wall, is art.
Well, if that's the meassure of intelectuality, I'll settle to be a retard, thank you very much.

Masks and Me

2009-11-13T18:07:00.005+01:00

I was going to write a post about what we've been doing, but I decided against it.
Instead, I'm going to talk about an interesting thing I realized the other day:
I miss me.
It feels like it's been the longest time since I was me, properly.
I had a long talk with one of the girls in my class a week or so ago (I think she was a bit drunk at the time) and I realized that I can't be me when dealing with most people. I knew this in part already, but I hadn't realized how much of me I had to take away in order to not make people uncomfortable or annoyed. When I hang out with the guys in my class, I can pretty easily just take a simple layer of stereotypical manly behavior and use that as a personality, it's a relatively simple piece of acting and an easy roll to fall into, but it's not really me, in any proper sense of the word. I have been able to be a part of me when we've been playing games at an internet-cafe here, that part has been very nice, since that is actually a role I can feel is a part of proper me, but other than that, I miss being able to relax and just be. It doesn't work here, or with these people. The biggest issue is, I think, that I'm much more used to the Scout-way of making friends, which is usually very direct. This doesn't seem to suit most other people, so I come off as annoyingly direct and personal. Not an optimal first impression. The good thing here has been that a lot of people have been drunk a lot of the time, and that tends to move people slightly further towards my favored way of socializing, but it is still pretty far from "the real deal", and it also tends to be quite temporary, what with people sobering up and all.
I guess that, in essence, what I really miss most is the possibility to meet new people and make friends without having to limit myself and go through layers of rules and technicalities every step of the way in order to not drive people away. It is really quite taxing, in the long run.
There were other things to write, but I forgot them. I'm sure you're all surprised.
Cheerio.

White Bread and Awesome

2009-10-28T19:01:00.002+01:00

Today (26/10) was an interesting day. I’ve eaten nothing but various versions of those triangular sandwiches the English love so much (9 of them, in total) and breakfast, which was also toast. Not my most healthy day ever. On the other hand, we had a guided tour of the older parts of Canterbury, and of Canterbury Cathedral. That building is by far the coolest one I have ever seen. It rocks. Everything in it is incredibly detailed and beautiful, and I’ve never seen stonework with that kind of detail before. Also, our guide was an elderly woman, who was also awesome. She liked Henry VIII (or, well, she liked talking about him, I don’t think anyone actually Liked Henry VIII) and she was great fun. She also showed us something called "the dunking chair" (sp) which was originally used for checking if women were witches or dead. It was a chair at the end of a long pole, out over the river. What they did was that they tied the girl in question to the chair, popped it into the water, waited until they got bored, and then brought her up again. If she by some miracle was alive, she was burned at the stake. So far, pretty standard. The funny thing happened after they had stopped with the witch hunts. Then, the chair was mostly used on nagging wives. It had a similar idea, except they were only kept underwater until they learned their lesson. Every once in a while, one realizes that we have actually come rather a long way on this whole gender-neutrality issue.

On the down side, my hostess (Geraldine Irons, that name rocks), doesn’t have an internet connection, and for some reason I can’t figure out how to connect to the two wireless ones I can reach from here, which is a shame because they both have very good signal strength. It just says that I have an "invalid IP address", and I don’t know how to fix that, since it’s already set to dynamic. Annoying, is what it is. I plan on getting a pass card for the university tomorrow (there hasn’t been any time yet) so that I will be able to check my mail, and post this. Hopefully, after that, I’ll be able to use Skype in the Wi-Fi zones the university has on campus some time.
Now I’m in my room, having just fixed my adapter for the power plugs. It didn’t fit originally, so I spent some time cutting bits of plastic off of the adapter it with a razorblade. Not entirely sure if that’s the best plan, but it works anyway. I’ve never used a razorblade without anything to put it in or hold it with before, so it was a novel experience, but it was the only sharp blade my hostess had in her house. If I hadn’t been able to fix it, or find a new, better one, I wouldn’t have been able to use the computer, which would have been rather terrible, since it took a bit of effort and space (not to mention air-plane weight ratios) to bring it.

After the tour, I went to a nearby pub with Longshanks and four other guys, and Longshanks managed to order one of the coolest appetizers I have ever seen. It was fried potato skins with bacon and cheddar. So it was basically a few thin bits of hollowed-out potato, which was made unhealthy by frying it, and then further unhealthy by adding glorious bacon, and then they covered the whole thing in unhealthy cheese. It was great. It was quite expensive, though, at £4.75.

28/10: I can post this now, I finally found time and opportunity to register an account at the university ,as well as a computer I could access without having gotten my pass card. I'll keep you updated as I go along, now it's time to go downstairs and have another Cider at the Student Union (which is on campus, by the way. Half of the guys got overly excited about the idea of taking a pint between classes).

Cheerio.

Money and Games

2009-10-08T01:25:00.001+02:00

Games I've bought in the past two weeks, organized in the batches I bought them in:

Desperados 2 - Cooper's Revenge
Assassin's Creed
Gothic 3
Peter Jackson's King Kong
Warcraft 2
Heroes of Might and Magic 3
Caesar III

Fallout
Fallout 2
Fallout tactics
Age of Empires
Age of Empires - The Rise of Rome
Age of Empires II
Age of Empires II - The Conquerors

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - Pandora Tomorrow
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - Double Agent
Spiderman - Web of Shadows

I suck at having money. Granted, it was far from as expensive as it seems, but still.
I suck at having money.

Murders and Births

2009-10-03T23:46:00.003+02:00

An impromptu C-Section performed by an unschooled pit fighter/murderer, with a pocketknife, on his murdered wife, next to the dying body of the man who just killed both the wife and the husband, and who was in turn killed by the husband, and all to the tunes of "You are my sunshine".
I think that is just about the most disturbing scene I have ever seen in any movie.
It was awesome.

Beggars and Fists

2009-08-09T23:25:00.003+02:00

I'll nerd on a bit more about Assassin's Creed, because I've spent a fair bit of time playing it the past few days. I've learned something pretty fun today. First of all, if there are any amongst you who do not know this yet, in AC you play Desmond, who is playing Altair. Instead of a health-bar, you have a synchronization-bar, designed to show you how in tune with Altair Desmond is. This goes down if you do things that Altair didn't do, such as get hurt, or stab civilians in the face. The interesting thing here, is that my favorite occupation of stabbing beggars to death costs Altair about a third of the sync-bar. If, however, and this is what I've just learned, you instead decide to put down your blades and elect to beat the poor woman to death with your own hands, a process taking several times as long, and involving, I presume, quite a bit more emotional stress on the part of the victim, the cost is only about a tenth of the sync-bar.
This has endeared me to Altair somewhat, because I can only assume that he hated these women as much as I do, and wanted them to know it when he killed them, he wanted to make it personal, perhaps to make a distinction between his working hours and his spare time.

Ownage and Balls

2009-08-08T02:54:00.006+02:00

I was going to make an edit, but this deserved it's own post.
For some reason, my Video of the Now has gone and retarded itself, so I'll just give you a link instead.
Pure Pwnage Project X Announcement
It will Pwn you in teh Face!

Failed Balls and Murder

2009-08-08T01:36:00.004+02:00

Today I have eaten what I must presume to be the most unhealthy thing I have ever seen a person bake. The Nightflyer wanted to make Chocolate Balls, (the english name for which, I have just learned, is "Chockladbollar". Thank you, Wikipedia) but we only had about half as much oatmeal as we needed, so we took some kind of extra-fiber version, and at the end they wouldn't stick together. So we did the next best thing, put everything in a pair of bowls, sprinkled some nib sugar on top, and ate it, so we both had about .7 of a liter worth of sugar, fat and cocoa each. It was awesome. I named it the HealthBucket.

I also inexplicably felt like describing a few things about Assassin's Creed, which I started playing again the other day. There are a few important lessons in here somewhere, I hope.
Number one, if I save you from a bunch of guards wanting to kill you, the correct answer is something along the lines of "Oh, thank you, I will repay this kindness". If you say "Thanks, I guess, but I could have taken them myself" and sound like a beggar, then you just bought yourself a fresh ticket to having a metal spike shoved through your face. Speaking of beggars, number two, if you ask me for money, I will stab you to death. The same goes for any person who shoves me for any reason, no matter the situation. If you shove me, you die. By extension, if you stumble around, sound like a retard and generally look like you might potentially shove me at some point in your life, I will stab you until you die.

Now that most of the homicidal tension is out of the way, I'd like to point out a few differences between AC and InFamous, since they are the only two games I have played that are comparable to one another. First of all, AC looks a lot better. The animations are smoother, the climbing looks more like climbing and less like a vertical frog on speed. The interaction between the main character and everyone else was also a lot better in AC, you get the feeling that all the civilians are actually people and objects, which I felt was lacking in IF.

Pants and Colors

2009-08-01T23:57:00.007+02:00

I don't like jeans. It's a stupid garment, and they are uncomfortable. On top of that, they also turn everything in the washing machine dark green, and makes the Nightflyer hate me for ruining her pants. Stupid clothes.

EDIT: I disagree with Yahtzee concerning the moral-choice-system in InFamous , I liked it and thought it was pretty sensible, since it was more concerned with choosing the 'nice way' or the 'easy way' than it was about being 'kind' or being an 'utter psychotic retard'. Then again, I didn't play through the game, maybe I simply didn't get to the corner of 4th and Bananas..

Warstriders and Spoilerfest

2009-07-27T19:05:00.004+02:00

I'm not sure if there's anyone reading this blog who hasn't seen Transformers: Revenge of The 9-Year-Old, but if there are, then avert your eyes.

Let's get the good stuff out of the way first. The fight scene in the forest reminded me once again of why we really need to have a proper Warstriderbattle in Exalted, because "duh".

Now, for everything else. First of all, it seems Michael Bay found a magical well of youth, because he must be at least 35 years younger than he is supposed to be. The supposed jokes of the movie are not really of the kind aimed at nine-year-olds, as much as the kind thought up by nine-year-olds. Why do the Retard-Bots have huge ears and buck-teeth? In fact, why are there Retard-Bots? It is pretty clear we are supposed to hate these guys, everyone in the movie does. The only moments of their screen time that I liked was when one of them was shot, and the other eaten. Sadly, it didn't stick. At least Bumblebee beat them a bit.
Why does the huge And-I'll-Form-The-Head-Bot have balls? It was pretty clear they didn't have a purpose.
Why did they steal an antagonist from "Terminator 36: We Ran Out Of Cool Shit Ages Ago"? The Look-Like-A-Girl-Bot was useless, stupid, and broke the point of the Transformers.
Why did they try to fool people into thinking they were making a properly bad teen-movie out of it, just to ignore everything that happened during that part, except for the useless sidekick? Why did they bring the useless sidekick?
Why did the original Primes sacrifice themselves to make a prison, if said prison could be shot apart by a single blast from an, as far as I know, not very combat-focused Autobot?
And why the fucking hell can't Michael Bay think up a plausible goal for the antagonist? What the hell? I mean, Megatron still seemed to be in it for the energy, to revive their planet, but the Fallen mostly seemed to like demolishing suns. Meh.
I had more things to add, and I might remember them later.
As a final note: Fuck You Translator. Fuck You.

Marathons and The Force

2009-07-19T16:23:00.005+02:00

Me and the Nightflyer have watched all six Star Wars movies during the past week or so, in the chronological order. I won't bore you with analyzes, I am sure you can all guess my feelings about the prequel trilogy. Right around the time we finished with that, I found Star Wars: The Clone Wars really cheap, and we decided that we might as well watch that too, while we were at it. Has anyone else seen this? I think The Editing Room had the right idea. I like how they have decided to show that this movie is CGI by making the CGI worse than in the actual movies, which is mostly CGI anyways.
Also, they really liked making stupid references to shit that made no sense, and turned the whole thing into a farce. Why take the model of a scary bounty hunter droid and turn it into a useless servant? Why are all the battledroids retards on purpose? Why does nothing make sense? Why can something with the 'feet' of an AT-AT climb sheer rock walls? Why does the whole movie feel like a video games, without all the good parts? And why the hell is it uglier than all the video games LucasArts have released for the past 7 years?

Meanwhile, I have also been playing Knights of the Old Republic, the best game ever released with anything related to Star Wars in it. Try it, you know you want to.

Emperors and Mummies

2008-09-04T22:59:00.003+02:00

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.

Computers and The Future

2008-08-08T12:45:00.003+02:00

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.

Wyatt Earp and Tombstone.

2008-08-07T16:05:00.007+02:00

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.

Phonecalls and Manliness.

2008-08-06T13:09:00.005+02:00

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.

Important Realizations. And Stuff.

2008-08-05T19:11:00.007+02:00

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.

Malta. And Spirits.

2008-01-06T18:14:00.000+01:00

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.

Christmahannukwanzaa. And Indians.

2007-12-24T23:45:00.000+01:00

Short Christmablog.
We had a nice, traditional Christmas (We actually have nice Christmas-traditions, our Christmases seem to follow the "TV-Christmas" close enough. I like it.)
I got nice presents, a lot of stuff I'll need when I move (Which isn't all that fun, but useful. Besides, it saves me the trouble of having to buy it myself, which would have been less fun) and a movie. That was probably the funniest thing. I downloaded The Last of the Mohicans two days ago, watched it and ordered it yesterday (Together with Dead Poets Society). Today, I got it from my mother. What are the odds? (O_o) Can't cancel the order either, which is annoying since it hasn't been processed. So, if anyone likes The Last of the Mohicans , and doesn't have it already, let me know. (EDIT: Same goes for Hackers , come to think of it.) I also got a perfume from MeiMei, with the most awesomest poem ever attached to it :)

Off-Topic: I just have to say this, Mount&Blade has got one of the most annoying, and yet successful, demos I've ever seen. Seriously. They let you download the entire game. All of it. Then they let you play it. For as long as you like. Or until you reach level 8. Then it saves, and shuts down. Buy a registration-code, or create a new character. HOW ANNOYING IS THAT?! (O_O)

ReFailed Exam and Pulp Fucktion

2007-12-21T00:27:00.000+01:00

I might have kind of semi-promised the Nightflyer to blog about something or other after the exams, which would be today. Darn.
Can't really think of much to say, though. Refailed it, not very surprised, aced the other two, Next.
I updated the Video of the Now to the two-minute-fuckmarathon that is Pulp Fiction in essence, it seemed fitting at this point, but it doesn't seem to be working very well. Annoying. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who haven't seen the entire move yet, though, since there is enough Fuck in that movie to spoil the entire plot even in this short state. I think just about every single scene is in there.
I got a Bananaphone from the Chinese One, it's awesome. I loves it. No idea when I'll get to use it though. Anyone know if I will be able to use it in any of the apartments in Uppsala?
Metro did something pretty weird the other day. Some cellphone developer, Sonim, had created a phone they said would be "unbreakable", in the sense that it could handle being run over by a car, or dropped from a three story building. So, they (Metro) tested it. By shooting it. With a 9mm Glock. And a Fucking Hunting Rifle. It broke. I could have told them that to begin with. Probably humor. Too bad that's not really what they should do, spend your money telling us about important happenings in the world instead.
Had a discussion with a friend today, about how an iPod isn't an Mp3 Player. Apparently. That kind of thinking always amazes me. Can someone explain to me why there seems to be so many people who think iPods are some kind of magical divine artifact, completely different from Mp3 Players? Bah.

I've been postponing this trying to think of something else to write, but I haven't, so I won't.
I'll just play some more S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and go to bed.

Sneaky Ballroom Blitz.

2007-12-03T16:00:00.000+01:00

Best weekend in a long time :)
The ball was great, meeting people I hadn't seen in 6-12 months was awesome, birthday was good, and (just to get a chance to use another one of those annoyingly overused clichés), last but not least, I got a Nightflyer :D
Just to annoy everyone and make you wait for a while, we'll get to that later.

Friday: Nice dinner with father, sister and their friends. Rare fillet of beef, I like. Some kind of weird cheesecake with cottage cheese, not so much. Nobody liked that. But whatever, was good day anyway. The Nightflyer arrived later than expected, and then we spent the whole night talking. Which, truth be told, probably wasn't the best idea, the night before a ball and sleepover we didn't want to sleep at. But whatevs, it was fun :)

Caturday Pre-Ball: Crude awakening three hours after lights off, but was improved by chocolate (Cocoa and sugar. Is good) and presents. Got a necktie from the Nightflyer, which was awesome. Got various clothes and stuffz from others, which was good too. Got an mp3player which was potentially better than my last one (Well, it's got more storage space, and looks better) but which was lacking in functions. Ah well, still good. Left to meet the Chinese one and Riklurt and leave for Katrineholm. Trainride was fun, RandomPerson#6249 hates me, so fuck her :)

Ball: After changing into proper ball-room attire, and annoying everyone else by letting the Nightflyer and the Chinese One spend all their time in the men's changing room, we went out to socialize. Rik pointed out how everyone seemed to point at me before saying hi, easily explainable by the fact that none of them had ever seen me in short hair, but it was fun none the less. The Chinese One had Chinese Dress of Doom +3, and the Nightflyer owned everyone with Nightflyer's Dress of Ultimate Conquest +7.

Caturday Post-Ball: More meeting-nice-people, although I didn't have as much time to talk to Anna as I might have wanted. Or, she didn't have time, or whatever. Very nice evening/night anyway. People went to bed at 5, which was boring. Took a walk with the Nightflyer and Angelica, and sat talking for a few hours.

Sunday: Stupid people woke everyone up an hour early, and everyone hated for it. Except the Chinese One, who hated her with a passion. Then breakfast, and then sleeps on couches. Which was nice. Train home, Rik did Tarot. Turns out a lot of it made sense, aktuly. Later, just about all of it made sense. After train, there was sleep and movie. Lucky Number Slevin, agin.

Monday: The Nightflyer woke me up when she ordered a ticket, which she then wasn't allowed to pay for. Interesting marketing decision by SJ, there. Didn't matter much in the end anyway, since she changed her plans and stayed. During the entire day, she hasn't spent more than, all in all, including breakfast and dinner, more than about an hour or so out of bed.

Long story short, just because writing conclusions are annoyingly difficult to write, I got a Nightflyer, and it it made of Awesome and Cute. We decided to be cooler than everyone else, and actually tell people, rather than keeping it hidden for ages. So a blog was the natural and obvious choice. The Nightflyer suggested I take the rest of everything in comments, so just ask if you want to know something specific.
I know the Chinese One won't be all too surprised, reactions from everyone else will be interesting.

Drunkards and Communist Pigs

2007-11-24T10:24:00.000+01:00

Rather productive night, this one.
Is it possible to freeze to death sleeping on the sidewalk in thin clothes at -5c?
If it is, then saving people is pretty liberating.
My mother picked me up and gave me a ride to Trosa, so I wouldn't have to pay for any kind of public transportation, although I probably would have if she had told me how late she was going to be.
Anyway, pretty soon after we got here, she went to bed, and the German girl living here was ill, so she was sleeping when we arrived. I was pretty bored and I couldn't sleep, so I decided to go for a walk somewhere around 2am, after reading the first half of Animal Farm (again). Half an hour or so later, I found a man sleeping on the sidewalk, pretty close to the church, drunk as all hell. I woke him up, and tried to get him to say something sensible, although I couldn't understand half of what he said. I asked him if he lived close by, and he mumbled something about a taxi, so I called one for him, and waited there to make sure he didn't fall asleep until it arrived. I tried talking to him to keep him awake, but the conversation was a bit one-sided, since most of the time he didn't answer, and most of the times he did, it was so slurred I couldn't understand what he said. A while later, no idea exactly how long, the taxi arrived and he managed to tell the driver where he lived (On the sixth or so attempt), and they drove off.

After that, I took a walk across the cemetery, for no particular reason, and I ended up checking the headstones for a while. The youngest person currently buried on the cemetery in Trosa was six years old and was called Tomas. (Actually, the headstone said "Little Tomas", which is a bit like Tiny Tim, only he, you know, didn't die.)

When I was finished there I was pretty cold, so I went home, read the rest of Animal Farm, and fell asleep. All in all, a bit more productive than my average night.

On movies. And beards.

2007-11-22T12:46:00.000+01:00

I'm going to write a bit about movies, because I'm bored and I don't have anyone to rant at.
I watched Get Rich or Die Tryin' yesterday, because a friend told me it was pretty good a while back.
This is not a phrase I use regularly, but Jesus Fucking Christ did it suck!
I was expecting something similar to 8 Mile, a movie that I actually liked, but damn. Throughout the entire movie, I was waiting for him to learn to sing properly, or at least write proper lyrics, but no. The lyrics are just as horrible when he's 12 as when he's grown up. And that's just one of the problems. I checked on IMDB, and, apparently, it's worth 3.5 stars. I really can't see why, there are just no good things about this movie. At all.
Moving on:

SAW IV.
I want it. Gief.

I watched Kiss of Death the other day. Cage is, as always, badass and awesome. Only this time he's got a beard as well. It also had Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson, and the main character's last name is "Kilmartin". I rest my case.

8MM was good, Cage again. Less badass, less beard, more morality. Better movie, all in all. Peter Stormare had a beard this time. It's all good.

Saw Casino the other day as well, haven't seen that one since I was 11 or so. Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, both awesome. No good beards, though.

I've suddenly decided to stop boring people with whatever movies I've seen recently.
I should go buy stamps, but that's about as fun as listening to 50 cent, only it takes longer. And the weather is boring. Bah. I updated the Video of the Now, but apparently it lags a bit. Nevermind, the song is still good.
And that, my friends, is the end of the news.

EDIT: Ok, never mind that I decided to stop boring people, I have Got to post this. This is Important. It is also rather spoiler-heavy, not that anyone should care.
I have just seen the hands down Manliest movie have ever seen. Possibly the manliest movie in all of human history. The title is manly: Shoot 'Em Up. The main plot is about guns. It has awesome one-liners. The main character doesn't even have a real name, he just calls himself Smith. He kills people with carrots. He shoots people. He shoots people, using carrots. He even shoots a guy five times, without even using a gun. He keeps telling everyone what he really hates. He crashes cars, he beats people up, he jumps from bridges and airplanes, he creates makeshift traps of death, and he delivers a baby while shooting people, and telling the mother that he hates guys in ponytails.
I am in awe. I didn't realize it was possible to create something this manly.
Go see it. Right now. No, you don't have a valid excuse, just go.

And Theen..

2007-11-20T20:05:00.001+01:00

Fox News told me conformity is very important, so here's my blagh.
Also, the Nightflyer made me do it. (I swear Officer, it wasn't my fault, she made me do it)

Judging by my earlier attempts at using any kind of public diary or whatever, I'll probably update this once every never. Which, truth be told, isn't very often. If you want to, you can always imagine that everything I write is Important and Wise, on account of the rareness.
Yeah, do that.

EDIT - A New Edit: The "Video of the Now"-feature is probably the best thing about this entire blog. Now I can influence people to watch weird videos without having to send them links.
It's awesome.
EDIT2 - The Edit Strikes Back: It appears the Profound Waste of Link, isn't, really.. Curses!
For some reason, the Video of the Now only loads properly about half the time, and clicking the Waste of Link seems to work more reliably than just reloading the page.
EDIT3 - Return of the Edit: The Chinese One made me post about how it's important for everyone (That would be Madde, Sara and Kristin) to remember to send money to the people in charge of the Grand Ball at the Castle no later than Thursday. Or they will be cranky.
Give me a call if you're confused about something.