Most of you reading this blog should take Harlans words to heart. Watch this and then repeat it by yourself in front of a mirror until it comes naturally to you:

One good thing, one bad thing:

I’m tired of hosting the videos somewhere else, dealing with flash compression and only standard video formats. In order to put my bandwidth to good use I’ll try hosting the videos myself. Let me know if it works/doesn’t.

[QUICKTIME https://monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/2007_v48.mp4 400 216 false true]

The bad thing is that I am braindead and managed to erase all the categories from the posts, transforming them into tags that this layout doesn’t support anyway. Bleh! I guess I’ll do my own layout as soon as the main homepage is finished (insert ironic snort).

I can’t imagine why someone would try to bring gameknot.com down – it’s the chess site where I hang out and get beat by people from around the world. I guess someone was losing worse than I and decided to kill the server.

To prepare for the trip next week, I drank 10×25¹⁰ bacteria, all contained in one small vial of Dukoral. I drank something so tiny containing so many individual organisms and now they gonna help me not shit myself. It’s way cool.

I was reading over the blog of a photo editor, and he commented that some photographers are good at smiling people, others are not. I haven’t thought about it previously, but this platitude actually hit home with me, and I’m definitely not in the “smiling” camp. Above is Hanna trying to ignore the camera.

I’m all for showing ass by low-hanging pants, but once you do it automatically, withouth being aware of it and not bothering to have pretty underwear, it sort of looks stupid. In this guys case, it wasn’t so much stupid as it was ill-fitting

These are mostly pictures from last wednesday at Uppåt Framåt. I really should update more often. If anyone has a suggestion for a offline blog editor that isn’t annoying while allowing me to scale/crop/upload images and videos, I’ll be all over it like a bucket of semen in a bukkake matinée.

And last saturday I was working in a bar until half five in the morning. Working is a good way to:

1) Earn money.
2) Save money.

Which I cannot believe i just wrote. All i want is to sit at the other side of the bar, doodling on a napkin and discretely and shyly watch women in the mirror behind the bartender. While pouring alcohol i had the company of Sine, seen here blowing smoke six in the morning while waiting for a tram.

I found an old sketchbook: I drew these in Iceland, I don’t know why:

I’m trying out a few solutions to publish video as painlessly as possible on the blog. If this video works for you, do let me know. Or, y’know, if it doesn’t. I’m slightly annoyed that this text appears under the video, as well as those two buttons.

I’ve disabled the Revver plugin that showed the video above because it was slowing everything down to a crawl. I’ll host the videos myself, and will put it in here shortly.

The past week and weekend has seen me doing three things:

* Calling companies for work.
* Playing chess and drinking beer.
* Getting inoculated for hepatitis a&b.

Oddly enough, I don’t worry as much as maybe I should.

Ever since I left for Iceland a couple of years ago, returning with a passable Icelandic and general confusion, I haven’t had any specific goals set. Getting in at HFF was not something that was only up to me to accomplish, so that wasn’t as much a proper goal as a wish. Once I got in it I felt awesome. And now, five years later, I’m sort of drifting along a bit too much.

I have great friends, live rather comfortably and am healthy. The stuff I worry about are the same stuff that most other people worry about; money, sex, happiness.

I could do well with more of all three, granted, but it seems like such a waste of time. I would like to worry about something that isn’t an abstract non-issue. (or in case of money, a manifestation of your abstracted self-worth) Of course I’d love to have glorious sex and spend a week drunk, but those things are not supposed to take up so much of ones time – they are the things we do when we are not doing other things. Like curing cancer, or becoming really good at baking.

And while I’m looking for work, any work, I’m occasionally drifting off into willy-wonka land, imagining what I would like to do. Drifting away isn’t very hard when all the vacancies I find have such a perky and up-beat note to them that I stare in disbelief: No one can honestly be this fucking optimistic about offering an evening-job at a call-center. I once interviewed for a two week job carrying crates at a supermarket (see prole) and the interview took one hour where I had to pointificate on how my arts degree would benefit the working place. I almost cried.

Maybe what I should learn is to relax and chill, man.

I am now inoculated against hepatitis a&b, so I should be ok with whatever it is that gives one hepetatis in Tunisia. We are leaving in three weeks time, and I’m looking forward to it. In the meantime I’ll be drinking cheep stuff, smoking as much as I can afford, and start up enough projects that unless I finish some of them I’ll have to move out of shame, in disgrace.

Darth Vader in love:

Engineer from Team Fortress 2:

If you have more money than ideas for a present, you could do much worse than getting me someone you care about this:

And here is where you get it: www.anticon.biz. (I’m a medium size, btw)

Reading guides for foreigners to your own country of residence is a hoot. One guide to Sweden that I picked up convinced me that I was an atypical Swede for not hiking in the country more than I do. (at all)

If you happen to be an American woman living in Sweden, you might be interested in this link: the American Women’s Club of Gothenburg.

In other news, last fridays dinner evolved into something with a, ah, snappy theme. I had gifted Jan a whip a year ago, and it was dusted off and prominently smacked about. Slightly disconcerting. It’s an aquired taste, I’m sure.