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.

Shakespeare and Nonsense

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

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.