When living in Karlstad I would drink mint tea all the time and flush the leaves down the toilet. It used to freak people out because I’d have this toxic green rim around the water-line in my toilet, giving the impression that the Hulk was pooing at my place.
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The past couple of days I’ve learned a few things.
For one thing, Gothenburg really likes Bruce Springsteen. The local tabloid had a prop plane doing slow rounds over the city, encouraging the Boss with improper punctuation and a sad whiny sound. I’m sure he was overwhelmed.
I’ve spent a month back home now, and much of the momentum that I had regarding a documentary project about architecture has been spent on stupid details (like the new look of this blog) and I have yet to book an interview. The coming week should be a make-or-break time to get started and get something on tape. Once I have that, I’ll start looking for financing and such.
Much of the time I feel as though I’m on vacation but ought to work anyway. It’s the constant annoyance of being a free agent: You’re not really free. Ever. Never ever.
I’ve been “running” four weeks now. Every two days I pull on sweatpants, plug in some headphones and go wheeze among normal people. It’s getting better, and I’m moving up to level three on the C25K scale, meaning that I’ll be running for a full 3 minutes next. “What is the world coming to” you might ask yourself, and I would answer “asthma and the end of times.”
My impulse control is still bad by anyone’s standard but my own, but smoking is down to sort of ten sticks per day and I no longer suck on that inhaler like a pup on a teat of life.
Two other smaller things that came to my attention was that although drinking is a nice pastime, I ought to find something besides that. Like drawing, or sailing, or maybe furthering my career as the worlds greatest person ev4r!
If you go out drinking with people who work in bars, it is safe to assume that they have a built in gene that allows them to not get as drunk as you, so don’t try to keep up. I went with Petter to a bar owned by an old friend of his and ended up at a concert at Pustervik. We were discussing how women on stage are very successful at looking awesome (compared to the same woman in grocers) so we were fawning a bit. One g&t too many later I was stumbling home, coming just short of having to drag myself along a wall.
Suggestions for hobbies other than drinking? I mean, it’s not as if I have an abundance of money or health here, nor is it helping me to look better or getting laid, and the routine is getting a bit routiny.
Anna is going with Hanna to Israel tomorrow, and as soon as I’ve set her up with a Twitter feed I’ll post it here. I’ve been trying not to engage in all these web 2.0 projects too much since they are devourers of time, but let’s see if Twitter can’t be useful for something. My own feed is in the column on your right, ladies and gentlemen, and you are welcome to follow or @ or whatever it is that the kids do. I decided to try after listening to You Look Nice Today, which is a very relaxed and excellent podcast (except the latest live episode, a rather meh affair) which apparently came about after the producers were twittering all the time.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s time for you to waste at least fifteen minutes here: Twittervision.
While working on this project of mine – yes a specific blog for it is coming up shortly – I’m starting to look for job. Preferably freelance or part-time, in whatever area that I might be good at. If you have suggestions or think that I can do something that needs to be done, give me a shout. I need to pull in approx 7000 SEK a month to stay afloat and am really terrible at this whole marketing myself crap. I need someone to give me money and then point at the ground and hand me a shovel.
Once again I’m humiliating myself by submitting a design to Threadless.
Whether you have an account or not, click on the link and vote on the design. This is very likely to make you a better person. Link: Never trust Cyan
—update—
Ouch, that was a short non-event. After one day the design was out of the competition with 1.37 on a 0-5 scale, as judged by 300+ people. No taste some people. Back to the drawing board…
If you’ve visited this blog the last couple of days, you might have noticed that it looks messed up or not loading properly at all. This is because I’m doing a redesign live. I’m crazy like that.
The point is to make the content area wider, allowing wider images and videos. One side effect will be that the old posts, with images and videos cropped to 400 pixels, will look less than good.
I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know what you like and don’t like (I’ll even pretend that I care) as well as if anything doesn’t work. (Y’know, technically.) Should you comment or email me about it, make sure to be specific since if you say “the comments look like shit!” I won’t know which version of the comments that according to you are smelly.
Good night, and God bless!
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again.
Woman has a bad itch. Really bad.
www.newyorker.com
If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. If you want to do it, do it because you love it. Find meaning in it. Otherwise, you’re tricking yourself. You’re tricking everybody.
Interview with Dalai Lamahs youngest brother.
www.tokyomango.com
I know that it’s easy to poke at the mote in Americans’ eyes rather than doing something about our own much more fashionable beams, but c’mon.
Prayer circles at gas stations to lower gas prices.
www.toledoblade.com
We celebrated midsummer at Hannas place. Plenty of food and drink, and multicoloured lights.
[QUICKTIME http://www.monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/midsommar_hanna.mov 400 300]
At midnight songs were sung to celebrate my 30th birthday, and I got a book and a rice cooker. As an additional bonus I got pummeled with handfuls of pepper. According to Jan, an unwed 30-year old man is called “Pepparsven” and that’s how we roll in Scandinavia.
I was out running yesterday morn, and even though I’m keeping with the exceptionally light C25K program, I cought some sort of bug that left me zombiefied the whole evening. Needless to say I wasn’t as entertaining as I should have been, but the whole dinner was very enjoyable from behind my haze of nausea and vodka.
I’m thinking maybe mini-golf for birthday thingy? Not sure. Ought to do something and the sun is out, so maybe “golf for the pepper person” is a nice thing? Have to check if they’re open today..
Exceptionally angered (albeit not surprised) about a new law that is voted upon in parliament today/tomorrow that will create a new government organisation that will eavesdrop on all communications going in or out of Sweden. Email, fax, sms, www, gsm and all that.
If it passes, it’ll be a good reason to start encrypting the shit out of everything. I mean, it’s a good idea no matter what, but this would prove a good impetus for folk like me to git going.
I did a crappy piece of propaganda as well. Here’s one of the spineless fucktards politicians that sold personal intergrity (what little there’s left) down the river:
“Why have priciples when you can be a turncoat?”
Not my best, but done in affect.
—-
Update: Yup, the law passed voting. I’ll be issuing a public PGP key presently; every email to me will be monitored (not yet, but soon enough) and should be treated as such. Gosh darn cunts.
—
Shit, people react quickly. In Swedish, but still. It’s a whole song available the same day the law passes:
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Reading over the personal blogs of the people who have been painted as the biggest traitors of their ideals (and rightly so) there’s so much hate and venom that I’m impressed. It’s like a political 4chan flaming which hopefully will get Fredrik Federlay and Annie Johansson to lose plenty of sleep.
The depressing thing is that these two Royal Fucktards™ are but two of the Royal Fucktards™ that voted this through. And if the social democrats were in power I’m sure as fuck that they’d use the same line of retarded arguing in defence of the law.
If voting would change anything, they’d make it illegal. Seriously. Who do you think that you are fooling?
If this blog looks silly when you’re visiting, it’s cause I’m trying out different themes. I won’t go through the trouble of coding my own (it takes a lot longer than you think) so I’m trying to find something that doesn’t break stuff.
Two columns, widget ready, 2.5 compliant, 500px post widht. In case you know of such a thing.
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Update to the update: I’m reverting to the old style just to avoid confusion. Looks like I will have to hack together a reasonable theme myself after all. Blast.
* I’m back in Gothenburg having worked in Stockholm an estimated 1/150 part of my life. The fruit of my labour: www.arkitekturmuseet.com.
* Birthday coming up, and maybe I should arrange something. Or maybe not. My only idea so far is to take a folding chair downtown and drink gin with strangers. This might change.
* A list of the hundred oldest companies still in existence. Currently it’s a 1300 year old spa in Japan. Read bizaims.com.
* I’m finally taking the plunge to upgrade this blog to 2.5 and will try to roll out with a new theme. If there’s any downtime, well, you wont know unless I’ve told you. And now I have. And now you know.
Leave it to a lazy person to improve the world ever so slightly.
Whenever I have a document with Swedish letters or spaces in the file name, I edit those out before sending it as an attachment or onto an ftp.
Here’s an Automator script that easyfies the process.
Drag the file you want to rename onto the script icon and Bob’s your uncle:
Å → A | Ä → A | Ö → O
å → a | ä → a | ö → o | space → _
It’s so basic that it’s almost embarrassing, but since I’ve been doing this manually I figure someone else might have use for it. Not very efficient app though; it’s half a megabyte for searching and replacing 7 characters…