White Bread and Awesome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.