For my 10th birtday, back in 1977, I got a tape recorder. While I was at school my brother Stefan and our cousin Tomas recorded this rendition of “Happy Birthday”, so now on Stefan’s 39th birthday, I’m sending it back. Happy birthday, bro!
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I always considered myself an early learner, so it’s somewhat belated to try mobile blogging. Anyways, here it is, a first, from the Stockholm train. Now, book and java:
That was summer.
Well, considering stuff, I should probably take this page down, or retire it like I’ve done earlier reincarnations. I feel I have very little to say these days and my writing lust is all but gone. The only thing I seem to be able to do in text these days is chatting, commenting and writing work related e-mail. I don’t even write private e-mail beyond the “Hi, of course I’ll come to your party” or “First you have to install Applejack and start in single user mode” variety. As I’ve said before: what the fuck happened to my writing aspirations? What happened to the joy I felt in composing long long letters/emails? What happened to those constant writing impulses I used to get back in the Pitas days, when I wrote a post whenever I was irritated/happy/drunk/content/fed up/shocked/awed? It can’t be “Age,” can it? Can it?
If I stop writing “tweets” and facebook statii I’d possibly feel the urge again. Har-de-har.
MartinFridaStefan, originally uploaded by mrpig.
This was childhood.
For a while there, back in 2004, I used Movable Type, which then went commercial, as well as incompatible with my server at the time. Now, I finally moved the whole shebang into WP, and I event took care to keep all time stamps.
Ain’t I the little Miss Goodie Two Shoes.
And it was almost a fucking year since I last posted. What in the name of god have I been doing?
I just moved to another host, instead of running this site on one of my work servers. The new host is the brilliant bitfuse.net! Thanks to Jonas & Johan for putting up with my shenanigans!
It was bound to happen. They said that Yahoo buying Flickr wouldn’t amount to much, that it would basically be the same. Well, guess again. Flickr has now started a censorship drive aimed toward it’s German users. I won’t write about it, and what started it, but here’s a link, and here’s another.
Suffice it to say I’m disappointed in many ways. I just hope last.fm won’t start doing similar shit now that it’s been bought by CBS.
So I went to bed at 5 Sunday morning, only to be awoken three hours later by a strange fluttering sound. It made me kind of nauseated, the same way I get when I hear the flutters of a crane fly in the dark. But now it was bright morning, and the sound was louder. I walked towards the kitchen, suspicious and slovenly, only to face a magpie in hysterics. It flew back and forth, seemingly not finding the wide open window it had used to come inside. My immediate reaction was to raise my arms and scream “Ka!” loudly in the face of the flying terror, quickly running into the living room, and opening all windows, then making a semi circular movement back into the kitchen, once again screaming “KA!,” causing the magpie to leave the premises, leaving some shit on my window and my hallway carpet (which I put my bare foot in). The rest of the morning was ill spent with nightmares about magpies.
I’m such a fuckin’ pussy!
Ja, well, this is promising to be the longest hiatus since I started to write shizz on the web. Who knows how long it will last & who cares? I recently read an interview with Lisa Carver where she addresses the poor quality of the blogosphere. She basically thinks that the easiness of web publishing has almost done away with personal criticism. When one dealt with printed matter, a poor product meant a financial loss, so you did your utmost to review what you had done BEFORE publishing it. And I agree, but part of what attracted me to writing on the web WAS that directness, you know to put it out there damn-the-consequences-and-damn-the spelling. However, seeing that everyone and their parents has a blog these days, we have a reality where it’s too fucking hard to find the GOOD stuff, so basically it becomes a cabal of backslappers, where you link to your fucking peers or idols.
When I started with what came to be known as blogging, I didn’t feel bad about mailing those who were considered the superstars of the then burgeoning blogosphere: Derek Powazek, Miss Melty, Loobilu, Mimi Nguyen and so on. It felt like a pretty new world and it was fun. With blogspot/blogger, myspace, flickr etc, it takes so little to become acquaintances that I wonder if it’s of any value at-effin-all. It has become like a collectors game, where you want to link to as many as possible, or to have as many my$pace friends as humanly possible. Who gives a sweet FA if you have many people on your friends list? Do you really think it’s sane to flaunt your icq buddy lists with your 500 “pals”.
Anyhoo, what made me open the admin interface again was actually because I have OD’d on TV series the past two days, more specifically Arrested Develoment: on wednesday, I watched all 18 episodes from season 2, and yesterday, I watched the final 13 of season 3. How’s that for insane? Lying on the couch for HOURS UPON HOURS, ALONE, and laughing a great deal of the time. To tell you the truth, it felt great, but my protestant work ethic (yeah, right, but there is a wee bit of it still lurking in the membranes) made me feel vaguely ashamed. Also, it was like eating all the best candy of the world in one single sitting. I’m slowly becoming aware that talking about TV series (or comics for that matter) often becomes really boring to the other party if they havent seen/read it. So now I feel midly irritated that I have noone to discuss it with, especially since I thought it’s truly one of the finest comedies ever. Sure, Curb is great, and Frasier, but Arrested Development is like Parker Lewis Can’t Lose for a more mature audience, with better acting and everything – well – better. It is super fast, with no pauses for laughter, the comedy is in word as well as in action, and goddammit I love the series. Now I have to force it upon a fitting friend or two so I have someone to talk to about what has made me laugh more than I have in a long time. As usual, some nitwits dumped the series, but at the same time I’m pretty grateful for series that actually end when they’re still on their top game. So long, Arrested Development, and thanks for all the laughter!
So there you have it: it actually became a post and it became a post about one of the most blogged about things, namely TV. Boy do I suck. Back to hiatus.
Well, the silence here is massive. So why? Well, mainly because I haven’t felt that I have anything to say.
The past months it’s been World of Warcraft (not as much since the 2.x patch of course), TV series, music & movies en masse. Downloading, buying, sorting, tagging, watching, listening. And frankly, I’m getting media saturated. TV truly is the boob-tube. One of these days, I gotta take a break and start tinking again.
I’m 3 years older, and you can see it too. Swollen eyes, balder, more unkempt.
Iorxhscimtor, my first WoW character – who was once hiatus’d for a month, then resurrected – now finally has reached level 60. I was a bit disappointed that there was no drums & salutes, but it felt pretty damn nice anyway. Screenshot from Twin Colossals, in Feralas. Click image for bigger version at Flickr. My profile is at Allakhazam, btw.
This saturday, I picked up the latest book by comic book genius Tony Millionaire (who, to quote Peter Bagge, “is so good he should be called Tony Billionaire”), Billy Hazelnuts. Billy Hazelnuts, like many of Millionaire’s books, leans heavily on old children’s books, and older literature in general, with its slightly horrid imagery and olden language. This, more than Maakies, would actually be possible to read for children, even though the book is likely to disturb them at least as much as the Grimm Brothers’ tales, or the scarier H.C. Andersen. Still, in the end, it is not the scariness that lingers but the insane inventions, the sweet melancholy and the spirit of forgiveness no matter what.
OK, I’m sitting here watching the first season of Hill Street Blues, and the subtitling is just plain crap at times! I mean, it’s for the hard of hearing, an English release and all, but shouldn’t English know US colloquialisms better than a SWEDE such as I? Anyway, this being an 80s series and whatnot, surely Bobby Hill brings RIPPLE and not RED BULL to a party? For shame, subtitlers, for shame.
Other than that, this series from my youth has lasted better than expected, although I believe I see totally different details now. This should have been re-released YEARS ago, if you ask me. Solid television from 25 years ago.
- This picture is taken from the first shot of Black Angel, a 1946 film noir. I can’t help but wondering: who’d name a hotel “Gaylord” these days?
Changed the header to a variant of the standard Binary Bonsai Kubrick theme one, this one featuring Martin Fredrikson Core’s brand new Borgstrand Stencil, part of the “Top of the Notch” FontpakTM from Fountain. As always with Core, an extremely well-made font! Check the picture to the right for a real life application. Photo by Finsta.
I also changed from justified to aligned, and added a link back to the front page from the header. I’ll probably adapt Kubrick some more, since there are some things that could be better, or at least more individualized. Or perhaps I’ll try Binary Bonsai’s K2 theme. Problem is I gotta move this server to another computer first. Damn you, Red Hat! This time I’ll go OS X.
The below is the unedited basis for an article I wrote for now defunct free magazine Monitor. The original printed in Swedish of course, and was edited to look like a real interview. I also put up the PDF of the printed article, for posterity or some such thing. Here goes (Derek, if you by some odd reason should see this and in some way feel embarrassed, please come forth and say so):
Back in 1999, I did a mail interview with Derek Powazek, who at the time was one of the first bloggers (before it was even called “blog”), and, I daresay, one of the main players behind the blogging r-/evolution. His work with fray and other projects was one of the main inspirations behind things I did at the time, like the little text I wrote about 10 days in France, the summer of 1999. That page is a graphic homage to the stuff that was on fray at the time, albeit not nearly as good. If I remember correctly, Powazek was also one of the founders of blogger, which was probably the earliest good free blogging service. At least it was via PowazekI first heard about it.
Anyway, once again, Powazek enters the fray (ho-ho) with a SXSW commentary, wherein he adresses that pet peeve of mine: semi-corporate entities that does nothing but trying to maintain a company-artist status quo, where the artist is constantly manacled, hampered and used up. Powazek, as an artist-of-sorts, puts it in plain text:
Until we (users, industry groups, lawyers, and politicians) finally make a clear legal and procedural distinction between copying a work for noncommercial creation of new works (like mashups or backups) and wholesale piracy for profit (like duplicating a work for the purpose of resale), we’re just going to keep shouting at each other in conference rooms and newspapers, and real innovation will never get made.
I couldn’t agree more. Piracy for profit is near-accepted, whereas small-time downloaders are hunted down. And god-damn the poor bastard who dare sample without clearance: onto him/her shall the hounds be released. Exchange should be easier, and whatever MPAA & RIAA might say: they are NOT there to protect the rights of the artists; they are there to protect the assets of the industry.
Today: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Pretending to See the Future
Now, back in 1982-83, I think, I bought Architecture & Morality by OMD (as they are usually called). I must have been about 15 at the time. At any rate, they were kind of grouped together with bands like Ultravox, Depeche Mode, Simple Minds and such. And the genre in Sweden was called, broadly, “synth”. A much besmirched genre it was, too, later on with dubious connections to the New Romantics genre (a genre that generally encompassed what we called “synth”). But unlike the aforementioned bands, OMD sounded murky and glum. Possibly, this had to do with the use of the first Emulator or some such beast, generating lo-fi choral backgrounds. I’m not sure I really liked them, but being 15, it was nice being difficult.
But now, more than 20 years later, I hear those songs differently: like moody punk played on synthesizers, like post punk without the aggro, but with the emo. The earliest OMD songs has not only aged well, they have matured, and in the Peel sessions version that I listened to when biking thru the snow, the roughness of live mixes oh-so-well with the remains of ‘77 punk and the emergence of the synthesizer as a pop instrument.
Today: Who Made Who – Green Days
Review: it worked perfectly as bike musik. A bit pumpin’ and humpin’, which made my sub-zero huffing more forgettable.
In 1972, the year of the olympic games in Munich, I was just four. I kind of remember the year, since my dad who was on the local rowing team went to Germany (Berlin, I think) and came home with a gift for me and a gift for my brother: I got a plastic car track, the one where the car is catapulted through a loop, and my brother got an “Olympia Waldi” teddy dog. We loved those gifts, and I think they are still somewhere at my parents’ house. Now, Olympia Waldi was the official mascot of the Munich olympics, a rainbow coloured dachshund. This was slightly before the games, but I have a vague vague memory of the Black September attack. If one, like me, grew up in Europe in the seventies, terrorism, hostages and cold war threats were highly valid, and I doubt that those born in the 80s has the vaguest of ideas of what it was like. Of course, it is material that could fill a 1000 blog posts, but I’ll just give one concrete example: in the mid 70s, one palestinian terrorist group announced that it had injected Israeli Jaffa oranges (I think it was the only brand of oranges that existed in sweden at the time) with quicksilver. I remember being at the local store with a friend looking through all oranges for signs of injection. If we found an orange that was slightly soft, we announced, aghast, that it was probably poisoned. At least for a very short time, I ate oranges but reluctantly. It was sometimes the feeling of the era: that we were close to very dangerous events.
Anyway! The reason for this post is that I went to see Spielberg’s Munich yesterday. For the record, I think that Spielberg’s so-called serious career is inferiour to his early genre-defining action/thrillers. But this one did not suck. On the contrary, it was a very nice time capsule of that era: clothing, scenography – it all felt very authentic. And the cast was great, especially Eric Bana, who I first saw in Chopper a few years ago. Strange to compare the two characters. What marred the movie, though, was the fact that some fucking punks in the audience were annoying beyond recognition. Sure, the loud talking was irksome, but when the fuckers started to smoke, it was just the most ignorant thing to happen to me in a movie theatre ever. A while after the smoking, and consequent telling-to, they left through the emergency exit, and just before that standing in front of the screen, hands in the air, doing the V-sign. Thirty minutes later, there was some pounding on the emergency exit, someone opened it and enter the morons once again. They were not loud for the rest of the movie, but still, the anticipation that they would once again do stupid things disturbed me. Still, a good movie that brought back memories of the 70s, as well as providing a pretty balanced view of that era of Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
If things are clearly defined – I gotta do this, I gotta do that! – then I do them. Before deadline, or on. But if it’s about leisure time, and I don’t have to do anything, some things take precedence. In this case World of Warcraft.
When I first installed that 10 day trial I said to friends: Uh-uh, no, I’m not gonna get hooked, I’m just gonna play these 10 days, and then maybe later on, I will buy the thing if I have time for and feel like it.
So, what happened? The same day the 10 day demo was over, I went out and bought it. And since then, I have played most days. Sometimes just 10 minutes, to check if some pals are online, sometimes 8 hours inna row. It’s weird: I play with real life friends, in the same city, but we’re doing it online. Strange. Sometimes, like yesterday, it’s like deciding we’re gonna meet at a specific place, only it’s on a specific server, in a specific place of the WoW world. But the past week, especially mornings, I dream about the game, the game world, just like I dreamt Deadwood when I watched it 10 hours in one sitting.
Just a word of advice: if you’re trying World of Warcraft, don’t plan to be able to quit it. It just ain’t easily quittable… [WoW portrait gallery]
God bless! Akismet seems like the answer to a boon. It is a WP plugin that is said to stop spam commenting. I REALLY hope for it to be a working solution. If it works, I promise that if I ever WILL make “mad paper” (not likely, though), I’ll send some Akismet way.
I just installed WordPress 2.0.1, and as usual, the update was simple as simple can be. And, oh, a while ago I installed the egocentric Scrobbles plugin. “Scrobbles is a simple WordPress plugin that fetches your Audioscrobbler data and displays it on your site where you wish”, which in my case is the right hand menu. So now you can see what’s playing, at least at one of my computers…
After almost a year of hearing about of World of Warcraft, and snippets of jargon popping up in conversations everywhere – at the sea, in the bar, at the coffee table – I finally got the opportunity to try the game in question, thanks to Calle and his 10-day gift certificate. Not having played multiplayer adventures since the days of mudding and mooing via telnet back in ‘93 this was a totally new experience. Not that I have really looked into the multiplayer interaction part so far.
Anyway. WoW being the social phenomenon that it is (about 5 million players so far), I felt that it was necessary to check it out sooner or later. The first impression is that it is actually surprisingly lush and good looking, to the extent of it being just as much of an “immersive environment” as the Myst series. In fact, it is much more immersive due to its total freeness of movement where you can literally run around for hours and hours without seeing repeat scenery. I guess many, if not most, of the Lvl60s (the highest level currently available in the game) have stopped feeling the awe I actually felt my first evening of playing, and instead focus on hoarding, finding rare items and being all-mighty in general.
As a game, the idea is brilliant, especially economy-wise (the game costs about €12 per month to play, in addition to buying the game), but also from a technological aspect:
- It was made available for the Mac and Windows platforms simultaneously (like all of Blizzard’s games since the company started).
- It can be constantly updated, both storywise and gameplay-wise due to its smart adaptation of the BitTorrent p2p protocol.
- Its use of geographically distributed servers result in a close to non-existant lag for most parts
Not only is WoW a game, but it is also a community in the truest meaning of the world. It acts as a basis for interaction via mail, forums, chat, talk, video, and it is becoming a society of its own. It has become, for good or bad, the preferred way of social interaction for millions of people. Geeky or not, they might be well on their way of moving from the status of sub culture to a real culture with the citizenship to rival a smaller European country…
I’m just making this post to test the flickr connexion with a blog. Now, what would be the reason for a system like this instead of upping directly onto the server containing the blog? Well, for one thing, the resizing capabilities of flicker is pretty damn good, and with the use of kungfoo’s 1001, uploading fotos is pretty darn nifty. The styles need some working on, though…
Mark Mothersbaugh is a great man, I tells ya. Not only was he in DEVO, one of the hep-est bands in the history of the universe, but he’s also a highly insightful chap who makes film music. This morning, before going to work, I read an interview with the man in Believer, McSweeney’s brill textmag. Buy it if you can find it! As I’m always looking for reasons to slag the major media corporations, here’s a quote:
Because today, if a record company collapsed, who the hell would be losing, except the people who were out of jobs? Consumers aren’t going to be losers. And if you’re in music just to become a big, fat rock star, then probably I don’t like your music to begin with. [...] And if you get rid of a lot of the poseurs by destroying record companies, maybe it’s a good trade-off.
And off Mothersbaugh goes to view an exclusive screening of the latest movie he scored, Herbie: Fully Loaded, with the words:
Listen, I better get going. It’s time for me to watch this screening. If you want, I could leave the phone on while I’m inside. that way, you can tape the soundtrack and put it on the black market in China. What do you think?
I think, “Kudos, Mark!”
Haunted House, the psychotronic movie club I used to run with my friends Honk, Buck, Werner, Empe and Björne 1993-1998, was one of those things that was an unproportionally big fixture in my life. Towards the end, it waned, but for quite a few years it was a not-gentlemen’s club that we used to force our idea of good (or at least interesting) movies to the interested populace of the city. In all fairness, they were few, but true, and for many years after we folded the whole shebang we were still asked if we were planning on starting it once again. But we declined. None of as had time, and the gusto was no longer there. Still, for more than five years tuesdays meant revelry and egg on the face of so-called good taste. Now, with MPAA and whatnot prowling the streets like a Stasi agent with a bludgeon, it would probably have been a legally risky behaviour. At the time, though, THE LAW WAS ON OUR FUCKING SIDE!
Terry Teague was one of the many unsung heroes of Apple, both as an idealist and an employee. An Apple employee since 1988, Teague was much involved with freeware projects in his spare time, keeping the good part of the 60s spirit alive: helping people and not think of it in terms of capital gain. Read an eulogy at Twiddly Bits.
- For the first time in quite a while, I baked a cake. It was juicy, but could of been juicier. Besides, I didn’t have any ginger at home, so I only used cardamom, cinnamon and cloves. It smells awful cosy.
On August 8, Björn (Buck) and Lisa (Lisa) got hitched, and I had the fortune of being invited. We got wined and dined and well & drunk. Hard liquor makes you talk. I remember hassling an unknown girl with a nickname I thought too funny: Special K. Incidentally, I said it far too many times, damn my eyes. I woke up early the next day, still wearing my dress pants and shoes.
- Lisa & Buck, k.i.s.s.i.n.g.
- Lisa & Piotr. Piotr is a Robot and PhD to be.
- Married man Buck in full effect. At this moment in time (22:22.22 according to the camera, but it was actually an hour later), I was drunk as a skunk. Goddamn you, free booze!
- July 15: My brother and I
- July 17: Pop and mom visiting me in Lund
- July 19: My all time favourite ice cream, Pop74. Mom bought it for me in Vänersborg.
- July 20: My grandma Greta. I love her so!
- July 21: One of the walls at Grandma’s. Old photos of old relatives.
- July 5: Jocke, Richard and Me at the Accelerator festival.
- June 24: Nicke and Anna’s daughter Hedda on Midsummernight’s Eve
- June 18: Hanging with Björn, Martin, Anna & Hilmer in the botanical gardens
Criminy! Most people who blog post every fucking day, stating their colour of socks and whatnot. Me, I stale completely and post nothing for ages, and then comes a short post which states very little but the obvious:
- yes, I’ve been watching movies,
- yes, I’ve been buying records,
- yes, I’ve been re-reading comics,
- no, I haven’t read a lot of books as of late,
- yes, I’ve been watching TV series galore,
- no, I haven’t been drinking a lot,
- yes, I’ve had vacation
- no, I didn’t do anything grandiose,
- yes, I’ve been to the flea market,
- yes, I climbed a roof,
- no, I didn’t like it particularily,
- yes, I’ve been babysitting,
- yes, I don’t believe the hype,
and so on. I’ll post a few pictures in the next post, so there. Currently: baking a cake. It smells delish. Listening to iPod connected to stereo. It’s some sort of metal, and how the fuck should I remember what it is?
I’m a devout believer in the crippling effect software patents will have on software development in general, and open source development in particular. Participate in the webdemo against the EU Software Patent Directive like WE do, and/or talk to anyone you might know that may be able to influence the politicians. The vote will take place between the 5th and 7th of July. Just say NO!
There is plenty of information about what sofware patents really would mean. Basically: no vlc, no mplayer, no ffmpeg, no gimp, no OpenOffice. The list goes on and on, and as you can clearly see, strong software patents WILL mean that software will be controlled by the few big companies that can afford patents and the lawyers to go with them. It just plain stinks!
Totally silly: MPAA has decided that BitTorrent is a criminal protocol per default, which has resulted in the autobanning of people using BitTorrent for totally legal purposes. There’s an article in Boing Boing that tells about a case in particular. The huge free media repository archive.org also uses torrents for distributions, as does game companies such as Blizzard, and many many MANY others. Shall I EVER be able to stop complaining over the sheer stupidity of Big Biz? Not bloody likely.
This saturday, 2 days ago, the first Kontra-musik festival took place in Malmö. Fool that I am, I had a whole hawg to drink before going there, but it was still a very enjoyable event, dizziness notwithstanding. The lighting was beautiful, and the sound great. The live artists were swell, and especially Isolée was a big surprise. Cockrockdisco with Jason Forrest was, as expected, fun drillcore of the highest order…
Here’s an elektronikkk-looking pic I shot of Isolée, btw:
First off, I moved back to the old theme. The reason? It looked like crap in IE. Again!
Now then: the massive open art project UbuWeb is no more. At any rate, it will no longer be updated:
The UbuWeb Project — a decade-long experiment in radical distribution of avant-garde materials — has finished. Founded in 1996, the project has been a success beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. As of Spring, 2005, it averaged over 10,000 visitors daily and hosts nearly a terabyte of artworks in all media by over 500 artists.
The site will be donated to a university shortly, where it will be archived intact for posterity. Please note that the site will no longer be updated. A URL linking to the archive will be posted on this page.
A big THANK-YOU goes out to the principals, as well as the artists. I know that much of the material was/is probably copyrighted, and infringed upon, but it seems most of the artists have been very supportive, and showed that sharing the wealth isn’t necessary something that will COST you money. Having followed UbuWeb since 1999 or so, I’m sad to see it staled. But there are other projects ahead, I’m sure. For example, you can still listen to Kenny G’s fine web radio shows on WMFU. You should. I’ve found lots of music through Ken, and I believe you might too.
Well! Yesterday, my brother Surgubben complained that his blog looked like crap in IE. Go figure. I totally forgot that Explorer sucks so nicely at showing CSS. Anyway, I hooked him up with a new theme that worked significantly better, and right now, I switched theme as well, to Patricia Miller’s winning contribution to Alex King’s theme competition. I think my brother’s looks much sweeter, actually. One of these days, I’ll make my own theme. Word.
Two days ago, I received the 4th season of Homicide from Amazon. I LOVE season boxes! Or boxes of any kind, including sweetness like this. I’m not going to delve on Homicide now, because I’m hungry & need to get my lunch soon-ish, but let me tell you: it’s one fucking awesome series! Season 3 is probably the best so far, but season 4 shows promise & more. The only problems are
- That I’m a goddamned junkie when it comes to boxes
- That the DVDs lack subtitles (being a swede, having English subtitles really helps)
- That I will have watched all episodes by monday evening
- That I will need to buy a new box pretty damn soon
And that’s about it. And, oh, tomorrow I’m going to the Kontra-Musik festival. 12 hours of blip blap drööööön! Will be interesting: vegan food & Jason Forrest.
Last week, premiere TV BitTorrent site btefnet was taken offline, and their channel on efnet now states “BT will no longer be releasing any torrents or have a website| thanks everybody | Don’t forget your towel”. Apparently, MPAA sued btefnet & several other torrent repositories, and of course no one wants to battle MPAA in court. Now, the thing with btefnet was that it was a TV episode only torrent site, that – I daresay – PROMOTED TV programs rather than causing the producers any revenue. Most TV series are, AFAIK, bought by other TV channels, who get money from their viewers, or from some other sort of funding. Sometimes, people record popular series to VHS, or DVD when they are aired. I’ve done it in the past: The Simpsons, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Star Trek, Sopranos, Twin Peaks, to mention a few. Nothing strange there.
Now, through btefnet, one could download the latest TV series without having to wait a few years for them to air here. I’ve discovered quite a few TV series through btefnet. Quite a few. And this past year I’ve bought 8 or so DVD boxes of TV series. More than ever before TV torrent sites popped up. As a matter of fact, I never bought ONE TV series DVD before bittorrent. I wonder, is the loss of revenue on sold TV programs that significant, compared to the huge fan base that the TV torrent sites has generated? Not to mention that MPAA’s “vigilance” is pushing file sharers into increasingly secure models of file distribution. I can understand going after movie torrent sites much better, since they are undoubtedly responsible for at least a decline in video rentals (I, on the other hand, still rent 4 or so DVDs per week).
I mean, get with the fucking program, you goddamned losers. Understand that alienating fans is something you do NOT want to do. Period.
A totally uncalled for picture. It’s just that I like the name. I guess it’s only funny to me and a few others. The picture is from the documentary about soccer hero Johan Cruijff, Nummer 14 Johan Cruijff, from 1973. It looks awesome, but unfortunately, I have no subtitles…
Two weeks ago, me and old compadre Björn was in Copenhagen. Jollities, smørrebrød, mooning, aquavit & beer was the flava of the trip. A trip to Eiffel Bar is mandatory!
Aha! I recently installed an olden goldie on my G5: Duke Nukem 3D. That takes me back.
Thanks to ambitious freeware mavens like icculus.org, macologist and ScummVM we can now play plenty of older games on OS X and Linux, including Duke 3D, Monkey Island 1 + 2 and Unreal Tournament 99. It is really nice to see what one “ooh”ed and “aah”ed about almost a decade ago. Duke 3D really is so damn blocky it’s a wonder I ever thought it looked “real.” That shows what the mind can do to a fundamentally good idea.
Since last time i wrote, I bought and installed OS X 10.4 (”Tiger”, in Apple vernacular). It’s some slick shit, but I assume it will have some bugs ironed out in the next few months, making it slicker still. The biggest fly in the ointment is the fucking Finder: still the causer of the spinning Gay Pride ball. Its sluggy file copying is still there, its non-adjustable and frankly erratic “snappy grid” and strange network behaviour too. As icing on the cake, it seems to have a real fucking issue when it comes to “Bonjour” (nee Rendezvous) printers. What did they change? At any rate, some stuff is really impressive, especially where graphics are concerned. I recommend John Siracusa’s massive review, which is basically great, although very metadata-heavy. Heh!
(Just now listening to Devo by Warm Wires)
What else? Well, Apple just launched iTMS in Sweden. At about the same time, a Tiger-compatible Roxio Toast was released. Among the new featureas was the ability NOT to be able to burn DRM‘d AAC tunes sold via iTMS. This decision was made by Roxio after “discussions” with Apple. I have no doubt that Apple acted big biz and threatened Roxio in so many words. At any rate, this means you NEED iTunes to burn iTMS music. That also means you need to use CD-/DVD-R writers that iTunes can recognize. That is just bogus, Apple. Bite the hand that feeds you, morons. Personally, I feel that services like Warp’s Bleep.com (who offers LAME –alt-preset standard encoded MP3s sans DRM) and Audio Lunchbox (who lets you dl both ogg and mp3s) is a much better alternative. If not, there’s always jhymn. Or go buy vinyl, gramps.
Hiphoporama.net was a swedish only site that me & a couple of friends (Phat Pat, Hel & Frans) did back in 2000. It was a series of interviews with writers, emcees and deejays from this wee city of Lund. It was taken offline 2003, when the City stopped paying the server hotel fee. It’s a pity, and albeit old, it still have some great texts and pictures. Although all text is in Swedish, of course, it still looks pretty nice, for a site made in 2000. so: here’s the hiphoporama.net archive for all you “peeps”! Remember that it’s an archive, so many links and few email addresses still work.
I came to think about a thing earlier today, upon reading a new post by my brother: why on earth am I writing in English? I used to be better, you know, but these days my written English flows slower, and I’m constantly watching myself do grammatical errors. Maybe I should start writing in Swedish, breaking a decade-long tradition of publishing on the web. or maybe not. Maybe I should do both, mixing it up. Nar. This is, after all, a good exercise, and I would probably spam my own blog if I were to shift to a language that lets me babble to my hearts content. Still, I’d like to write in Swedish again. My brother’s newly started blog made me yearn for cursing in Swedish words again. It’s entertainment. Rantertainment.
So, anyway, I just came home from a cup of coffee with my friends Buck & Werner. Buck, I hadn’t seen in years. We used to do drunken online word-battle way back when. Sparring partners in cusswords. Today, we came to discuss music distribution. It came to my knowledge that a Swedish record store pays 100 Swedish crowns + VAT for a CD. That means that a store pays about 13 euros per CD! No wonder records are expensive in regular record stores. If you’re using an independent distributor, you (the record label) get maybe 55 crowns per CD. Then the distributor adds maybe 45 crowns. The store adds taxes, and another 30-60 crowns. If it was not so bad, I’d call it hilarious. But now? Maybe preposterous? Or just plain silly. This means that bigger companies with their own distribution makes 100 crowns per CD, BAM! into their pockets. Of those, maybe 5, 10, 15 goes to the artist. The rest goes to something else. The corporate machine. The beast. The husk, as I called it before. Something needs to be done, and done now, and it has nothing to do with punitive measures. If not, I fear that much of the music industry, including independents, will have a hard time surviving. That would be a pity, indeed, but it has little to do with piracy per se, but with silly price tags and too many stratas involved. Someone ought to clean that biz up, but good.
These past few weeks has seen the start of a battle between Swedish anti-piracy groups/Corporate shills/general numbnuts and pro-piracy interests/hackers/general law dilettantes. My take? Shove it, you big corps, you! I think it’s pretty clear that I think artists should get paid, and companies who work for artists as well. But what I don’t think, is that it’s a good thing to stigmatize file sharers.
Sure, I’ve downloaded my share. Let’s see, what movies did I last “steal” from those companies? Last of England and Jubilee by Derek Jarman, 12 Stories About John Zorn by Claudia Heuermann and finally La Société du spectacle by Guy Debord. Oh, and that Bruce Haack documentary by Philip Anagnos. I ask you, why the FUCK would I spend time downloading mainstream crapola that I can rent in any store for 2 bucks. And why the fuck would YOU do anything of the sort, either? Forgive me, but clogging the networks with readily available Hollywood schlock is just plain insipid & boring. I’d rather go to archive.org and dl some ephemera without being stigmatized by the “Biz”. That said, I actually rented a Hollywood movie yesterday. Not for the first time, not for the last, I’m sure, but the shenanigans of the movie industry will make me think twice before renting or buying from them again.
Did I mention I just ordered yet another TV series today?
Basically: die, you dinosaurs, die. An industry that was once exciting and happening (Columbia’s Odyssey branch even tried to sell Stockhausen and musique concrète to HIPPIES in the late 60s, for chrissakes!) is now but a qliphoth. A husk, void of what was once good.
This is totally irrelevant, basically, but I replanted a flower today, and took some pictures, basically to test out my new Canon Ixus 40. Sure, the pics could be better, but I’m trying to take photos manually, mostly, and the light sensitivity of most cheaper digital cameras are for shit. Anyway, here goes a little pop-up series of photos. Javascript needs to be on, because I didn’t feel inspired to do it any other way. Poo poo on my juju. Click here, yo.
Yup. I just upgraded to the BRAND SPANKING NEW WordPress 1.5, which means that the standard template is used. & it’s looking good, yo! It’s based on Binary Bonsai’s “Kubrick” theme. Pretty sober & stylish, so I will stick for it for a while. I must admit that I don’t honestly don’t understand the inner workings of em as compared to px. Or I do, but it takes some gettin’ used to it. So visual change = soon. Ish. First I have to finish this dry-ass sandwich:
Yesterday, Little Lord Bill told the Danish government that if they didn’t get the software patents law proposal through in the EU, he would close down a Microsoft-owned firm in Denmark & move it to the USA. 800 jobs would disappear. Now, I AM against software patents, for a number of reasons, but mostly, I guess, because it would mean that “real companies” can & will stop a number of small companies & open source projects. What non-commercial project would dare to test their might against the judicial powers of Microsoft, Adobe or whatever? Possibly, most people (or politicians) don’t understand the ramifications of passing the software patent law, but luckily some do- Poland, for example, was instrumental in stopping the Software Patents Bill last year.
As a reply to the Microsoft threat, Danish Social Democrats replied:
“Danish policy should not be dictated by corporations – no matter how big they might be. What’s crucial is finding a solution that serves small as well as big IT companies best. And that is not necessarily the solution that Microsoft or other software mastodons feel to be the right one”, says the Social Democratic IT spokesman Thomas Adelskov.
Good one. Understandably, Microsoft wants to see to it that they will get money, even if Windows loses ground as an OS platform/Office standard package. Presumably, they will try to stop projects such as Windows emulators for Linux and free Office alternatives such as OpenOffice and StarOffice if such a law were to be. Gimp would probably be sued by Adobe, and many of the Linux extra programs would be sued by any company with the money for a law suite.
You can read more about Microsoft’s threat at FFIIs Wiki. If you’re in Europe, be sure to sign those petitions!
Yesterday, I watched most of the belated keynote stream. As usual, Steve Jobs was on form. Despite the odd glitches, it all went pretty smooth, although the applause weren’t really as frantic as they have been several times in the past. This despite the introduction of what seems like the Macintosh LC for the 21st century, the Mac mini. Now, perhaps it wasn’t such a big surprise as it could have been, seeing as Apple did the dubious deed of taking Apple rumour site Think Secret to court after it had publicized “gossip” regarding BOTH the Mac mini and the new iPod Shuffle (which is pretty good value, considering it costs less than many brand name 1GB USB memories). Now, I’m not going to discuss whether Apple did the wrong thing, but personally, I think it’s stupid and likely to alienate hardcore Apple fans.
But back to the applause: I was pretty damn excited when I read the live report on irc 2 days ago, and even more so when I saw images of the Mac mini. Of course, I’ve got G5s myself, but still: it is a great argument for switching to mac from Windows. The cost is no longer an issue. If you have a virus-infested Windows box with some years of usage, you might want to consider moving to a different platform. Unless you’re an avid gamer or numbercruncher or video/graphics pro for example, in which case the Mac mini is far to pussycat.
Strangely, I react upon Apple’s world domination schemes like a true non-conformist: vaguely considering a switch. Of course, I won’t do it. Having used macs since I borrowed an upgraded Mac 128 in 1990, I’m not likely to turn somewhere else. What else is there? SUSE is becoming a great desktop linux, but it lacks apps, and has still got some configuration quirks. Windows has great games and great virii. OS X is slick, stable & swift, and one can still run X11 apps on it, if needed (through the brilliant Fink project, for example). Nuff said.
Some years ago, in 1999, I was diagnosed with a mild form of skin cancer. It was treated with a then-newfangled method called PDT, with gaffa’d boxen and much interest (I wrote about it then). Since some time, oh maybe a few years, I’ve suspected that the cancer came back, and today I got that affirmed, causing immediate treatment. This is why I sit here at 4.30 PM drinking wine. Because the feeling of PDT is akin to being burned by a fat ass cigar, at least in my case. Like I wrote last time, small tiny fireworms move around under the skin, and although the pain isn’t flashing, it’s fucking unyielding. Hence the vino. Anyway, I’ll finalize this treatment next week, with another batch of laser & ointment. Yay! I still bless Sweden for being fairly cheap when it comes to medical care, though.
I have forgotten to write about The Conet Project, a highly scary 4 CD album, downloadable for free from hyperreal, those stalwarts. The Conet Project is a collection of recordings of so-called “numbers stations”, shortwave radio transmissions of – mostly synthetic – voices reading strings of numbers and letters accompanied by eerie squirks and distant music. Allegedly, those stations are spy transmissions. Noone has given any other feasible explanation.
These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round. One might think that these espionage activities should have wound down considerably since the official “end of the cold war”, but nothing could be further from the truth. Numbers Stations (and by inference, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre stations appearing since the fall of the Berlin wall.
At any rate, this is truly scary listening. Try it alone, in the dark. Things will feel cold and hostile and not like they seem to be…
It sounds like a very pretentious kind of title for a blog entry, but I just cried my ass of after having watched the docudrama Touching the Void on DVD. Partly, of course, because it’s an incredibly human story with so many levels of humanity, and partly because it’s about heroism in a way different from what is often showed in movies. It’s about pain, sacrifice, friendship, shame, love, life and what have you not.
But what also made me cry about it was the realization that we humans are stunningly complex and beautiful beings, and still we so rarely ARE these things. I’m thinking about every sad fucking thing humans do, like the Abu Ghraïb degradation scenes. The contrast of these things against this little story about 2 people in the Andes, struggling to survive, is staggering. I know it might be a childish thought, but to me it was an extremely emotional point.
My friend Naffa told me a story yesterday, which I thought was brilliant: some years ago, Zanzibar had a huge problem with tsetse flies which affected the cattle. Now, this could have been “solved” like any typical development project, ie resulting in a massive loss of funds, lining the pockets of sundry officials. But in this case the solution was much different: First, economic control was removed from Tanzania, minimizing the risk for corruption. Secondly, total control of the project was demanded by the commission that solved the problem, namely IAEA.
What they did was this: instead of trying to kill all tsetse flies with pesticides and such, they directed their efforts directly toward the male flies. Since the males of the species has the distinct feature of only being able to mate once in their lifecycle, the scientists decided to lure the flies into shooting their wad in a sterilized female. So what they did was to build a “tsetse factory” in Tanzania, that produced 70 000 radioactively sterilized female tsetses, which were then let loose. True, there was a period when there were A LOT of tsetses flying around Tanzania, but very vey quickly, there were no more males with loads to spend, and thusly, all tsetses on Zanzibar died. To this day (the project took place in 1997), there are no tsetses on the island.
True, one might argue that using “mutated” flies is to meddle with the forces of nature, but it did get rid of the problem, and in a much more efficient and economic way than any normal pesticides would do. What would be a better method? Infesting the island with fly-eating lizards?
My friend Naffa, who lives on Zanzibar those days, is visiting me. Actually, he’s been living there for almost a decade now, running a small-ish cabinet making business, and a sawmill. I don’t know if the mill is up and running yet, though. Any which way, he’s in Sweden again for a combined vacation and machine-buying trip. Apparently, those old machines he bought when first moving there are a bit on the run-down side. Hence, he’s going to carpentry machinery auctions.
I’ve often been thinking of going to Zanzibar to visit him, but first, I was short of time, and now money. That’s the way things always seem to be. Having read Ryszard Kapuscinski’s brilliant The Shadow of the Sun, made me even more interested in going to Zanzibar. Or somewhere in Africa in general. As a westerner, I believe it’s the only part of the world that is still shrouded in a vast mysterious veil. Perhaps I’m just romanticising & exoticising, but think about it: how often does one read about the non-arab (I use the term loosely as all hell) Africa in the dailies? Heck, the Rwanda genocide had been going on for months before it gained any headlines in the West, and even then those headlines faded fast. In a Europe that lost part of its mystery with the decline of the East Bloc, I believe we are in dire need of places that feel like they belong in a story. Adventure. Mystery. Suspense. Danger. Perhaps it is only to be found in fantasy, but I’d like to experience that feeling some day again, much like I did when me and Naffa did our big Europe trip ‘87 – ‘88. But maybe I’m just too afraid, and too lazy. Fuck it.
The weather is too nice. It is a bit on the chilly side, but the sun is shining like nobody’s business.
I added a new link to the left: my little icecasted radio station. Check it out, if you feel like it. It is what they call an “eclectic” selection, but I dunno. It is very mixed, to say the least. If you want to hear stuff that is different from empty V and commercial radio, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. No talk, no commercials, just a nifty 128 kbps feed that KICKS ASS. Mail me at radio[.AT.]sunnerdahl.org if you wonder anything about a track you heard. Recommended players are iTunes [mac & win], Whamb [mac], xmms [linux, X11] and winamp. But that should go without saying. But really, you should check out whamb!
Talking about checking out, about a month ago I reacquainted myself with the fire multiprotocol pager (multiprotocol meaning “supporting several chat protocols, like AIM, ICQ and MSN). It’s still a fairly ugly app, compared to Proteus. The difference, apart from Proteus being super-slick, GUI-wise, is that a) Proteus is shareware, whereas fire is open source, and b) that fire supports GPG encrypted/signed messaging over any chat protocol! That, my friends, puts it apart from any other chat client I have ever seen. In fact, I don’t know of a GPG encrypted pager for Linux, even. Just like the brilliant GPGMail mail bundle for mail.app, Fire is a must-have if you ever feel like communicating truly in private! I’d hope for total GPG integration in OS X out of the box, but that may be a utopian sentiment.
At any rate, I’ve decided to totally dump PGP. Since it went commercial, it’s been going downhill, and downhill pretty fast too. If one checks the console log, one notices that PGP causes tons of warnings. It’s fairly expensive, too, and they have an ass-backward licencing system that prevents site licensing for, say, universities. So these days I rely on OS X “secure empty trash”, encrypted DMGs (128 bits, but still), File Vault, GPGMail, Fire, and GPG as a whole of course. Sorry, PGP, it was fun while it lasted (I used PGP since the mid 90s, I think, command line stylee on Sun OS. Possibly because it made me feel like a hotshot), but now I close the book on you.
This is a testposting, using “SmartyPants” and “Markdown”. I actually don’t know exactly what it will do, so this is going to be fun.
OK, then. It changes quotes to curly quotes and such fineries. I suppose it looks nicer, but there’s a whole helluva lot I should do with this page first. But if you’re interested in those two Movable Type/BBEdit plugs, go to daringfireball.net/projects. Daring Fireball rocks.
FFII is one of those organizations I’m grateful towards. Their mission-statement is:
to make basic informational resources freely usable
to protect the creator against the plagiator and the public against monopolies
to give political weight to programmers, information-creating enterpreneurs and informationally literate citizens
and that is something I can but say “amen!” to. This world, now, it’s so desperate to bend over for corporations and state it makes me feel ravaged all over. What the fuck happened to the idea of the state protecting and looking after the interests of citizens, not nameless entities? Fucking Cthulu, all of them. They say we get the leaders we deserve, and boyee if that’s true, we’ve surely been very very very bad children indeed…
So: this was the week when I bowed down to buying digital music. And since Apple’s iTunes Music store scheme has serious disadvantages (being: i. only available to Norte Americanos. ii. using aac at too poor a quality and iii. using DRM), I bought it from elsewhere, namely Audio Lunchbox. Truth be told, I actually stumbled over it, and truth be told, I only bought a record from them because I feel the urge to pay the piper once in a while. Not that seldom, actually, but my economy being what it is, I can’t afford to pay as often as I’d like to.
Audio Lunchbox – A Capsule Review: pros: i. very good selection of independent labels & artists ii. tracks available as both mp3 and ogg of decent quality iii. documented good artist pay (65% of the prize)
cons: i. slow download speed (at 30 K/sec, this was unexpectedly slow)
So, this being sunday morning, I can not think of much other to write. Except writing “welcome back” to Jenny with her new goodlooking Little Priest weblog. Sweet potatoes, indeed.
Other than that: nicotine, the upcoming !!! album, ubuweb, Molly Roth, Judson Fountain, Sultans, Black Dice, the Hellboy movie, Xiu Xiu, the Lightning Bolt encore video, Mission of Burma’s comeback, Mokira, A Frames, Blankets, Real Stuff, Cocorosie, Modest Mouse, Orkstorm, Astroglides & Thomas från Sverige.
So. Once again it’s friday. Last weekend, my friend Jenina visited from Stockholm. We hung out and DJd together at a big party. Unfortunately, the turnout wasn’t as big as I/we had hoped. 150 or so, but the real partvibe never appeared. Pity. Also, i had hoped that the audience would be more into rock, but the requests was embarrassingly mainstream: Beyonce. Britney. Christina Aguilera. Et fucking cetera. And the party was hosted by an independent movie theatre! Damn, people! Anyway, we rocked some with Scissor Sisters, LCD Soundsystem, Ladytron and such stuff. It was a fun set in the end, 6 hours straight. Jenina, by the way, is the promoter of Ladyfest here in Sweden, which will take place in both Stockholm and Malm–. I wish I had that much gusto, to even come up with a huge idea like that and then do it.
On sunday, the day that SPRING CAME TO TOWN, we walked around and just hung out. Watched American Splendor again (3rd time). Watched Six Feet Under. And this week has basically been ill-spent playing Neverwinter Nights, crack in the guise of a game. I helped save a friend’s ProTools system, yeah (another friend had accidentally attached his powerbook via firewire to a broken USB port, and then the powerbook lost power, and apparently gunked the entire power-on card for some reason), but the main occupation besides work has been Neverwinter Nights. I almost hope my computer will get old soon, because if I keep gaming this much, my dreams will be shot forever. Still, since I have little money, it’s nice to be able to sit at home and have fun for free, even though the fun borders on obsession. I even consider playing it mornings before I go to work. Really! And I’m 36. AND OH, the new Part Chimp single “Bring Back The Sound” ROCKS OUT!
Well, I was just checking NetNewsWire (which is a WAY nifty RSS reader. And to think I hadn’t bothered to learn about RSS until I started this “diary”!) and there was a new post at one of my favourite tech-y blogs, namely Daring Fireball, where he linked to an article targetting one of my pet peeves, the feltching crap-software-of-the-ages RealPlayer. It’s really lazy to relink like this, I guess, but I want to maximize the number of people who learns to hate the assware that is RealPlayer. Man, I hate you, Real!
Go read Tomas Jogin’s take on the shiznitz!
I’m sitting here, drinking coffee, while waiting for my pal Urban. He has all but relocated to Stockholm, but is down here in the doity South of Sweden to do god knows what. Anyway. While waiting, I thought that I oughtta write a little something. Inspiration doesn’t jump at me like a scoundrel in a dirty alley any more…
[Urban appeared, this is the next day]
I’m sitting here listening to London Is The Place For Me – Trinidadian Calypso In London, 1950 – 1956 and the Slayer box, Soundtrack to the Apocalypse, while lappingsipping coffee, a non-guilty pleasure. I think I prefer the former, which must be a solid sign of me getting old, yeah. Ha ha ha: In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida covered by Slayer is fun, in a cartoonish way. Another sign of maturity is that I’ll probably stay at home tonight instead of going out. But then again, I use the pretense that I’m strapped for cash, which is altogether true. But sitting at home? That’s kind of nice, but not very exciting, if you don’t count dismantling a huge shelf exciting. At least I will start removing my records and books from it, a hefty load to carry. Vinyl certainly weighs a ton, like the man said (Peanut Butter Wolf, I think, or DJ Shadow).
On a totally unrelated note: some stuff is certainly easy to find via Internet, like rare bootlegs and untranslated hentai, but something that has been seriously clamped down upon has been typefaces. In ye marrye 90s, EVERYONE swapped diskettes with fonts on them, but since the turn of the century, that has certainly waned. Both free and commercial typefaces seem to get around a lot less, and part of that is probably the decline of ad agencies, which I assume was the main buyer of fonts. My friend Martin Fredrikson Core made several really nice fonts, but I don’t think he ever made any 100$ bills from them. Pity, really. Collecting fonts was like collecting stamps: one never used them, but only looked at them. And bought them for clients, of course.
Ouch! The coffee is making me sweat. Or maybe it’s just Slayer. I think I’ll go for a walk.
These are expensive times, expensive times with little money to spend. And they wonder why the fuck record sales go down? That is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg, sire. I mean, I’m not poor, exactly, but there’s a high cost of living I haven’t experienced before. I guess I’m to blame for living in the city. I guess I’m to blame for only working 75%. I guess I’m to blame for not asking for astronomical wages. Any which way, there is very little money left each month and there’s very little I can do about it.
Of course, there is some “luxury” involved, such as food, the odd night out, the movies, computer & network fees, a record now and then, a magazine once in a blue moon, some cheap concerts, things like that, but BEJABBERS! is that not every person’s right? I think it is. One mustn’t grumble, they say, but why not? I shall grumble as much as I feel like (which is not so much, as a matter of fact). I “accidentally” spent 60-something Ä on books – comic books to make it worse – the other day, and I realize I should perhaps have spent them on the dentist instead, but easy come, easy go and such flummery.
And I still haven’t read them all: need to suck that caramel slowly now. As an aside, I must say something that I’ve said before: Tony Millionaire is a genius of a man! 3 of the books I bought was Mr. Millionaire’s Sock Monkey collections, which are, I daresay, almost as great as his Maakies collection.
But back to the money: is this the way it’s supposed to be as I grow older? Not enough money to travel anywhere, not enough money to buy good furniture, not enough money to get a loan and one day buy an apartment or other habitat.
What, I say, is the world coming to? Perhaps it’s just me growing old. Old and cranky. I better eat some supper before I start rambling, Grampa Simpson-stylee.
Well, the week has been an ordinarily mundane week, much like my weeks have been for the past few years. Except that I played a fair amount of HALO. Halo was once upon a time due to be released for the mac, when Bungie was bought by Microsoft Games. That caused a fair amount of anti-Bungie bias among the mac community. Not so with me. Sure, I like many people in this world dislike Microsoft just as much as (or more) people dislikes/-d CocaCola. Or IBM for that matter. Any which way, Bungie produced a good batch of Mac only games back in the early 90s, like “Pathways into Darkness” and the brilliant “Marathon” series. Marathon was an early FPS, but with an intriguing story. Now, I tried playing Marathon some months ago, and was appaled by the way it looked, even the last in the series, Marathon Infinity. Still, those Marathon moments was some of the more exiting gaming I’ve ever encountered.
And those moments still reverbate throughout Halo, which in part is some sort of continuation of the mythos suggested at in the Marathon games, a future akin to the one presented in the Alien movies, but not a copy thereof. Corporations, conglomerates, space marines, vastness, cyborgs, space leeches. Any which way, I’m sure most from my parental generation feels that a guy of 36 should not sit at home playing computer games well into the next day. On a working day, to boot. But that I do, at times. Especially now when I have a saucy G5 to play them on. My little brother, Stefan also played Halo a while ago, and it feels kind of strange how having a gaming experience in common can be as exciting as it is. I kept calling him, reflecting upon certain plot turns and conundrums. It was like I was 14 again, gaming on my brother’s C=64. Uncanny shit!
Apart from the, I’ve watched the latest Van Damme movie (In Hell), had a long walk which left my feet warm for 2 days, listened to a lot of music, downloaded Glass/Reggio’s “-Qatsi” trilogy, futzed with a new Linux server (my first), re-read the last 15 issues of “Hate”, bought the fabled jazz book Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, by Nat Shapiro & Nat Hentoff. It was later used as a template for the brilliant punk biography Please Kill Me by “Legs” McNeill and Gillian McCain, insomuch that both books are biographies composed solely by quotes from musicians and scenesters. If the former is anything like the latter, it will surely be the reading experience of the month.
So, well, it’s friday. I haven’t linked this page into the site structure yet. I will go to a movie (Lost in Translation or Big Fish) and a party tomorrow. And on saturday I will be an ¸ber-geek once again, by partaking in some role playing, and not of the “adult” kind, either. Woe is me: middleaged kid. Hell with that, as long as it’s fun. Me be homo ludens, shit like that. Too cool for school.
Well, duh. It looks normal as the whole hell, like the standard movable type you all know and love. So be it. I will hook it up to some nicer kind of look in the near future, if I decide to keep this fucker going this time around.
I have been around for ever and ever & ever in this biz, before it was called blogs, or even weblogs. By the way, that reminds me of a wee story: when I was barely 20, I was on a long car trip in Europe with a friend. At one point we met 3 US gals who had been studying in Copenhagen and was -then- travelling in Portugal. Any which way, I for some reason or other told them I was writing a “travel diary”, whereupon they burst into laughter & giggles. “Diary,” said they, “is something the kids write. Adults write LOGS!” Well, excuse me so much! Since then, log suggests to me that the diary you’re writing is somewhat on the “mature side”. Either that, or you’re fucking Captain of the Ship.
After I quit regularily updating good old Pigsville (and before that, quitting on “Castle Figging Greyskull”) I started the cerdo.pitas.com “blog”, which was kind of silly since I’ve had direct server access for a long time now. I was actually just waiting to scrap my Solaris box and move to a more updateable *nix/*nux, and this blog marks the spot.
[post moved from movable type blog]
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