The Search for Shiny Things: Part 3

The fields left behind, the teddy was growing very hungry. It had been so excited about the journey that it had forgotten breakfast. So when the road reached a little cottage with smoke coming out the chimney, the teddy decided that chimney smoke was pretty much a subtle invitation to lunch, and went inside.

The cottage, that may have been brown or may have been yellow, the teddy was no longer sure now that it was was inside, was full of boiling cauldrons and strange instruments and with numbers and letters scrawled on the walls. A tad peculiar, but still, the smell was amazing, so the teddy was in good spirits.

"Could it be that someone lives here?" called the teddy.

From another room came one big paw and then another, and with it a living breathing panda bear, and while the teddy bear was also a bear, he was much more conveniently sized, so the teddy was no longer sure that this was the right cottage for teddies to be in, even in greater number, and especially not in one.

"Who are you and what are you doing in my cottage?" asked the panda bear.

"I am the teddy bear," said the teddy, trying to sound courageous. Should worst come to worst and the panda bear tried to eat it, which the teddy thought that non-teddies might, it had little confidence in running away, so putting on a brave face was the best defense. "I am looking for things and stuff and such, mainly a tree and many shiny decorations."

"There are no trees and no decorations," said the panda bear.

The teddy looked around. No, indeed. "I have walked far, so perhaps you who have so much food," it gestured to the cauldrons, "could spare some for me?"

The panda bear glanced over, the big black circles around its eyes getting even bigger, at once insulted and amused. "There is no food here," it said. "I am a candle maker. These are candle cauldrons."

The teddy looked into a cauldron. The contents looked nothing like any candles it had seen, but it was in no way a candle expert. "This does not look like candles." It smelled like food, and the teddy's stomach stuffing ached.

The panda bear picked out some figures from a cupboard and set them on a table in front of the teddy. "That is candle wax. These are candles. Perhaps you'd like to buy some? I hear some people put candles as decoration in trees, after all. Let me show you." It lit the candles, that were shaped like stars and moons, and they immediately collapsed, turned into splatters on the table, and the panda poured some water on them to stop the table from catching fire.

"That may not be how candles are supposed to work," said the teddy carefully.

The panda bear sighed. "I have tried everything," it said. "I have half a degree in science, and I know numbers," it waved at the walls full of scribbles. "But no matter what I do, my candles don't turn out right. And nobody wants to buy them." It opened the cupboard, which turned out to be a whole room full of candle creations in all shapes and colors. "I don't know where to put all this. I just want to get rid of it."

The teddy's mouth watered. "I will help!" it said.

Before the panda bear could protest, the teddy had shoved a red diamond candle down its teddy throat, which was none because its head was directly set on its shoulders. And the panda had only started protesting when the second one went down, a green elephant.

"Those are candles, not food!" the panda warned. "They will make you sick!"

The Search for Shiny Things: Part 2

A little sorry for the crashing, but also quite proud of breaking the pole with only one kick, the teddy walked over to see how the scarecrow was faring, now that it was free.

"Are you quite okay?" it asked, looking down at the scarecrow.

"Oh woe!" the scarecrow exclaimed. "Now I will be stuck here, on my back forever! I shall only see the birds when they fly right above me, and I will get wet and cold and rot away!"

"I think you can stand up," said the teddy, eying the sticks the scarecrow had for legs. There was of course the possibility that it could not, but the teddy preferred to think positive.

Lending a fuzzy paw, the teddy helped the scarecrow to stand up. It was a little shaky, but could stand just fine, and after a little while dared take a few steps. Then it stopped and looked around, and again adopted a posture of dramatic despair.

"Oh woe!" it said.

"What now," said the teddy. It had never before known anyone that said "oh woe", and was therefore not prepared to hear it so many times.

"There are so many directions, I have never thought of this before! And any one of those directions could hold the best friend and conversation. However shall I decide on where to start. I can impossibly search every direction, even if I live forever, for you see a circle is infinity triangles."

The teddy wondered what the best conversation was, and if this was one. "I can be your friend," it said. "In fact, I am looking for a tree and many shiny decorations, to make my house pretty so that my friends can come visit."

The scarecrow eyed the teddy up and down. "You'll do," it said then, then leaned against the teddy's shoulder. "Actually, to be honest, I am glad to have a friend, any friend, but one should uphold a sense of standards."

The teddy nodded solemnly although it entirely disagreed, but it was hoping to avoid another "oh woe".

"Now that I have one friend, I suppose it's easier to choose a way to walk," said the scarecrow. "In fact, I will pick that one." It gestured wildly, and the teddy couldn't quite make out if he meant this way or that. "Great adventure awaits! Activites, speeches, possibly even songs!" On shaky legs the scarecrow began waddling away.

The teddy watched it go.

"And!" said the scarecrow, again turning around dramatically, "I suppose I should thank you. If you'd never come, I'd never gone on these adventures."

"You don't happen to have anything to eat?" the teddy asked.

"Scarecrows do not eat," said the scarecrow. "That is why we make great grain guards."

Such a sorry thing, thought the teddy. "Alright then."

Waving good bye, the teddy continued on its way. As it went, it hummed happily to itself, "I helped!"

The Search for Shiny Things: Part 1

The teddy made good progress all morning, but saw no one. Not a lot of anyone ever came to nowhere. Thus it wasn't until far beyond the corner of anywhere and elsewhere, a good way into the fields of somewhere, that the teddy saw another living thing. Coming down the road, the teddy saw a scarecrow standing in the fields, and two colorful birds hovering near it.

"Good morning," the teddy greeted the scarecrow.

"Morning," said the scarecrow, and there was something decidedly mopey about how it hung on its sticks.

"This is not a time to be sad, scarecrow," said the teddy bear. "It is a beautiful day."

"Perhaps," said the scarecrow.

"You do seem sad," said the teddy, a little disappointed that such a beautiful day had to be ruined by sadness.

"I feel trapped," said the scarecrow. "These are beautiful fields, and beautiful birds, and I am meant to sit here and scare the birds away, and so I am. But I feel trapped, stuck to the ground, and lonely I think, for even if I make excellent conversation with myself, sometimes one wishes for another voice, and the birds do not speak."

The teddy glanced over at the birds. They did not seem to be very frightened of the scarecrow, in fact they were lingering around mostly on purpose, taking a nip of the grains now and then and waving their beautiful feathers. He should help, thought the teddy. Because the teddy loved to help, and did it far too rarely, in fact if he could he would help all the time with everything, because everything was better with a bit of teddy help. So he let out a loud and happy sound; loud and happy came naturally to teddies, and waved his arms at the birds, who immediately lifted into the air and circled their heads.

"Oh woe! Why would you do that," complained the scarecrow.

"I was helping," said the teddy warily. There were those that did not want teddy help, he had forgotten.

"The birds were my only company, however poor." The scarecrow lifted its skinny branches dressed in rags to the sky and the circling birds. "Oh if only I could leave this field! I could go see where the birds go when they fly away. Or find other company, or work, or activity, or possibly a singing lesson."

The teddy hummed and looked at the scarecrow, or more specifically the pole that it was stuck on. It was driven deep in the ground, but looked old and dry and not terribly strong.

"I will help!" said the teddy enthusiastically, to declare intent so that the scarecrow would not be surprised like before, and with a hearty kick the teddy broke the pole right off.

With a shriek and waving its arms quite comically, the scarecrow fell crashing to the ground.

The Search for Shiny Things: Prelude

Once upon a time there was a teddy bear, who lived in a little white and drab house in the middle of nowhere together with the teddy's best friend in the whole world, the moth. The two had been together for a while, and were quite satisfied, although the house could be less white and drab, and the nowhere less... well, nowhere. In fact, they both thought they could use some more friends, but what friends would want to come to such a place.

So the day before Christmas, the teddy bear and the moth made a critical decision. If friends were to be found, the house must be improved upon. The moth would stay at home and try to improve it with color and imagination, and the teddy would go out in the world in search of a tree and shiny decorations to put in their living room for Christmas.

Americans and Internet Explorer

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

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

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?

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!

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

A Bunny, and All The Time In The World

(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

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

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

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.

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.