Weblog | I don't like the word blog, it's ugly. Anyway, new content happens here. (Swedish dito)

About me and the site | Twenty-something male who likes text. Obsessed with things such as books, reality, communication, and one or two tv-shows.

Archives | Things written here since... well, 2001. Some of it is good, some is utter shait.

Books | Books read, not books written. So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.

Photo | I like my camera and it likes me.

Links | Outwards, away, flee.

e-mail | J. Nicklas Andersson

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Complicity to everything

In a way Iain Banks is right when he said this about Complicity: “A bit like The Wasp Factory except without the happy ending and redeeming air of cheerfulness.” In a way, a small way, and that is only about the ending. The Wasp Factory ends happily although the road there is very, ehm, horrible. Complicity is better in that regard, up until the ending. You know the phrase “the truth shall set you free?” Forget that.

Unlike the Wasp Factory, the main character of Complicity isn’t an insane sociopath and as such the book itself is less disgusting. The violence, however, is brutal, naked and conceived by stark realism. It is not an easy read, Banks experiment and here he has the murderer presented in second person. The result is intense and rather much better than it could have been.

A good book, but Banks has proven that he can so much better.

Closed due to holidays

Have I ever told you that I hate holidays? Well, I do. They’re an enormous traffic jam, where noting really happens except that the car in front of you suddenly stops, the driver puts it in park and then leave it there. Where is Godzilla when he’s needed?

There is no point in going somewhere either, as the café’s are not open at all and besides that, no one’s home anyway. Holidays make being sick seem like a good idea, at least then you can lay in bed and sleep through the whole thing unaware of what time it is.

Cheap rates, we promise

The Bomb and me

I saw Dr. Strangelove first time in several years esterday. Why it has taken this long I don’t know, since I think it is one of Kubricks betst movies (tie with Full Metal Jacket).

No anxiety yet

I read Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks yesterday, rather good but probably one of the weaker sf-books he’s written. It was nowhere as good as his non-M works. This got me into the vicious circle of reading those books of his that I own but have left unread. (Currently: Complicity)

It also made me buy the Business today, a purchase which I’ve managed to push ahead of me until now. I mean, it had been standing there on the shelf for so long, alone and cold. I just had to do it.

How reading Banks is related to studying for the exam tomorrow? Easy. Point on, and this is almost such a small point that it is peripheral, he is actually mentioned in the last chapter of the Penguin-book. And second, Consider Phlebas is taken from a part of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. All these things matters in English Literature through the Ages, at least if you ask me.

Proof about the demise

Got woken up by a phonecall, which for some reason wasn’t as bad as it use to be. It might depend on the caller but that is rather arbitrary . Anyway, one of thesse two persons (they were, and still is I presume, Niklas and Ola) told me who had gotten away with the Oscar for best actor.

At first I though I was joking. But He wasn’t. Ola was dead serious but he cloud’t stop laughing. And I can see why. Denzel Washington for Training Day?! What do they do, let a crack pipe go around before it’s time to vote? This is the worst monstrosity that has happened in this category since last year when Russell Crowe went of with one for that Spartacus-copy. (Sure, Mr Crowe didn’t overact as much as anyone else in that movie but for that part he just didn’t deserve it.)

This should once and for all prove that the Oscars, whatever standards they once claimed to keep, have fallen hard into the murky area of “give your friends an a award.”

He's getting cranky now

Finally. There are some of us who call other people for Bruce and say things like “Crikey!” and “It’s really cranky now!” Now, the movie industry has decided to exploit our icons as well, and really, who are we to say no and stop them?

Steve Irwin gets to wrestle livestock on the big screen. This sure beats watching Crocodile Hunter reruns. This summer might have been saved after all.

The Oscars are going down

Whoopie Goldberg. Why God? Why? (For the record, I can’t stand her. She’s just not funny, period.)

Steve Martin was good last year, why not bring him in again. I don’t think Goldberg has the guts to make fun of Russell Crowe an entire evening. Tell me it is just a ploy, please.

I don’t really know why I care really, except that I watched last year and thanks to the presenter this year, I can sleep. Sleeep. I think I need more tea.

Return to the scene of the crime

It all began this morning, the outlines of my body didn’t hurt anymore and the only reminiscense of the horrible Saturday was a dripping nose and an irritating cough. I decided to read Ansible and see what I’ve been missing. This event threw my senses away and I started fiddeling with TeraTerm Pro to get the SSH-tunneling back.

This is not a wise thing to do, not here and now. I have an exam on Thursday and here I am reading Usenet for the first time in several months. But I like it. God damn, I’ve missed this.

That crappy feeling

I feel like shit. Imagine an overse steamer has been dragged up upon your back and then They left it there. The salt water drips down onto the deep scratch marks and make it even worse. This is how I feel, although 20 hours of sleep seem to have helped somewhat.

Literary approval and disapproval

I found the following piece in my scrapfile and since it reasemle a somewhat coherent thought in the midst of it, I though I might just as well post it here.

A while ago on a mailinglist there were a wild discussion about the acceptance of science fiction in the literary world. This is a topic that some people have very strong views about, mostly of them stand on the side of those who feel that the genre is marginalised.

I have been giving this some thought and come to the conclusion that both sides are right. Science fiction is at the same time both marginalised and accepted. Some authors move seamlessly in and out of the genre without being torn to pieces., while others are simply being ignored. This has its reasons. Most hard science fiction is thrown aside because from a literary point of view it isn’t interesting. A story where the science is more important than both plot and characters isn’t going to attract a wide audience outside those who really are interested in the science bit. Those which focuses upon the characters and plot are going to get more readers and much more acceptance outside the genre.

I think this is a fair trade off. It is not the whole world and I can’t understand why people whine about why the literary cabal never includes Isaac Asimov or (Sir) Arthur C. Clarke, aka The Boring As Hell Twins, into their canon. Strictly speaking, most hard sf is just manic masturbation over a glossy NASA-manual.

The ilk of Lewis Shiner, Iain Banks and Jonathan Lethem on the other hand, are storytellers. They write about people with more than one dimension and they dare to experiment without being afraid of total stylistic failure. They get credit where credit is due because they’ve earned it from a literary point of view. That is the important bit, because if you do not care about producing solid literature with depth, there is no way in hell to gain acceptance in the literary circles. This should be elementary knowledge.

(For the record: I like some hard sf, but I feel this obsession with plausible physics and God know what is a bit misdirected. Literature should be about more than a shiny object that with plausible physics can lift a car fifteen inches above the ground.)

I'm the last to know

I was reading through Follow Me Here when I saw something frightening. To my great shame I must admitt that I had missed it totally. Spike Milligan is dead. Not so surprising that he was of a rather high age, but still. Why has this not been given more cover than it did? Had Mr Milligan not been an old comedian but a young musician instead; lets say 23 years old, couldn’t play the A-chord on guitar to save his life and who died because of a speedball OD than they would have given him a worldwide cover and huge headlines on the front of every paper. People who knows what they’re doing gets nothing, and this makes me sad. All this means that the chances of a new series of the Goon Show is even less than the chances of a new Monty Python season. After all, The Pythons are all alive minus one, but all the Goons are gone period. Damn.

Movies that left an impression

There have been three movies, no, make that four, that have affected my life [in a way that I myself could feel the change (added because Tommy couldn’t read between the lines)]. Perhaps not so much outwards but the way I think and look at my surroundings. Four movies. Only one of them is from my childhood, the others are relatively new and I don’t know if they’ll still be on this list a ten years from now. But now is more important than the future, so here they come in no order whatsoever.

The first one is The Empire Strikes Back. I saw it for the first time in 1982. Back in the heyday, it was not new at the time, it had existed for two solid years and I was five years old. Needless to say, the entire trilogy wrecked havoc on my entire childhood. I think I owned 80-95% of all the toys excluding the ships. Those where way to expensive for me. I knew Star Wars by heart before I started school.

The second movie is Fight Club. It is the greatest romantic comedy of all time. Pitch black romantic comedy.

Third movie, Pi. A paranoid obsessive guy that might be a bit autistic. When I saw this I was reading Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways, and these two together formed a strange symbiosis. It was as if someone had taken the filter we all have across our eyes and tilted it. Just a little bit, everything seems familiar but it’s not.

And so to the movie I’ve been watching for the last five days, almost in a long seamless loop. Untitled, or, as it is called in the shorter theatrical release: Almost Famous. The longer verion is much better in all aspects. For me, it felt as if it conveyed two messages: “you might still be uncool, but you might do some interesting stuff” and more importantly “follow through and pay the consequences.” And that is important.

Sleep takes its due

Damn. Overslept. Oh well, the important class isn’t until the afternoon so it’s not the end of the world.

I feel like shit.

Signs of true despair

-- Oh my God! Mimes!
-- Where? Where?
-- There, the sign. This is one reason to move.
-- Or not to move here at all.
-- Do you know anyone who like mimes? I don’t.
-- Neither do I. Clowns do, I guess.
-- Clowns?
-- Yeah. Mimes prove that clowns isn’t on the bottom of the food-chain. That there is a group that without any doubt is lowest of the low.
-- Oh. Well, clowns are excused as kids laugh at them.
-- They do?
-- Yes.
-- Must be because they don’t show Manne the crazy clown on telly anymore.
-- Probably. You know, people will shun this place now.
-- Put up signs: “Mimes. Stay away.”
-- “Contaminated area.” The army will protect the border and make sure no one enters or leaves.
-- No, the SWAT team will target the building: “Step out of the invisible box or we will breach it.”

Language studies

David Crystal might not look like it, but this man managed to make a lecture about langauge studies funny. The main focus was language of the Internet and even though I think he’s wrong in some cases, he opened me up a bit and made me more tolerant. It’s ‘masing. One of the best moments I ever had within the four walls of a lecture hall.

He came in, standing rather short and sat down when one of the Swedish professors itroduced him in an overly long speech. When the professor directed som questions to him, Crystal only nodded or gave the thumbs up. That is, until it was his turn to speak properly.

“I want to diagree with [the Swedish professor] about the cell phones. I want you to turn them on! It’s data, input. That way, when someone calls they’ll be a part of this lecture even though they’re not here. Either through text messaging or by voice. But I want a transcript from the call afterwards.”

False green ears for free

For those poor sods without a region free DVD-player, Shrek is soon to be released as both VHS and DVD here in Sweden. The best thing isn’t that this edition contains both the regular version as well as one dubbed to the glorious language of Swedish. No, it is that if you pre-order it at a fairly large chain store, you’ll get a pair of Shrek-ears free of charge.

I already own the region one version, but damn. I think I want those ears. But I don’t want to own a dubbed movie. Animated movies must be dubbed in Sweden, it is a state law or something. The problem is that the dubbing sucks ass — it’s so bad that it isn’t even funny. Kung Fu movies from the seventies seem to be expensive masterpieces, where the out of sync lip movements have been digitally manipulated to fit the new language.

But those ears. I can not drop it. Although I haven’t seen them myself, they are probably cute and ten times past silly. Who wouldn’t want to own a pair of those? (I want to see Shrek again but I can’t. It is either here or here, and the key thing is that I’m at neither of those two places.)

I never learn

I’ve begun to structure up the Great Swedish Novel from dozens of notebooks and I’ve encountered a problem. A huge problem that blocks up everything. It is not one that is impossible to fix, quite the contrary. I need to do some research for part one. (Three parts in one book, each part is about different stages in the main characters life.)

Research. I’m too lazy for this. I could go the easy way and just read up about the subject, but I think that way it would end up being more of a Hollywood stereotype than the Hollywood stereotypes themselves.

Part two and three present no such problems what so ever. Especially the third act where absolutely everything is make believe.

31 pieces of music

Thelonious Monk: The Columbia Years ‘62-’68
Three wonderous cds and a 60 page booklet. Eveything drapped in stylish design, it even uses a neat variation of digipack that I hadn’t seen previously. Although I might seem like a heretic to some, this is a really good box.

Miles Errant Update

To all those who are Google-guided here by the search words “Miles” & “Errant”, this is the deal. According to Baens Bar, and I trust them in these matters as it is a part of Baens website, it is an omnibus. Content is as follows: Brothers in Arms, Mirror Dance, and a sort story from Borders of Infinity. Ok? Ok.

The rest of you can start reading the series with The Warriors Apprentice or btter yet, the trade omibus titled Young Miles. My brother did, now he’s hooked and he simply doesn’t read much.

Book debate at BBC

I’ve just read the Self v Littlejohn transcript. (Found through Plasticbag.org (”where else?” he asked suspiciously, not expecting an answer.)) Two writers of each political side (left and right obviously) in the studio at the same time. Hilarious jinx are bound to ensure. I wish I could have heard it myself, but alas, BBC doesn’t transmot those things to the rest of the needing world.

Thanks to this I think I’ll move up Will Self’s How the Dead Live a notch on my to read pile. No, wait. It’s already at the top. What should I do? Might as well start to read it right away.

Wrong colour

The scientists with far too much spare time have discovered that they made an error when declaring the colour of the universe to be turquoise. It’s beige.

To realise this, you don’t need to have a particular smart brain or even a complicated research process. At least not when one considers how they’ve done it. Here’s a newsflash: if you take lots and lots of colours, from let’s say 200 000 galaxies, and then mix them together, what colour will it end up as? If you’ve not fucked it up totally, it is a 100% certainity that it will be of a brown hue. It will of course depend on how dark colours where used, but it will still be brownish.

Send the scientists back to high school for two weeks or give them a crash course in how to mix colour for a printing press. Sheesh. The ignorance some people display makes me sneeze.

How the dinosaurs died

My brother has a great theory about how those big reptilian primates normally called Dinosaurs where wiped out from the face of the planet.

A giant Sloth beat them to death with a pointy stick.

So, now you know.

Two books the same year? No, that can't be true

I’ve written about it before, but I myself has shunned it like the plague. Reminiscence of the teaser chapters from the last book still freshly in mind, I tried to steer clear from that place. I didn’t want to go there again. In the end, it won me over, I couldn’t stop myself as I typed in www.baen.com in the address bar.

I clicked on Schedule and then I got a shock, twenty thousand volt straight into my spine. Miles Errant? Has she been forced to change name on this book too? Then I looked at the date and got another shock, forty thousand volt into my left kidney. September?! What the fuck?

I scrolled down to May and there it was: Diplomatic Immunities by Lois McMaster Bujold. Thank you $Deity. It still had the same name and was to be published in May as planned. I could breath calmly once again. Oh, and I read the sample chapters. Damn me to hell.

But the name Miles Errant haunted me. I fired up Google but found nothing about this book except a clean slate pre-order on Amazon.com. Nothing at all. I think it is an omnibus of previous novels, but I’m not entirely sure. I both hope so and I don’t.

“Seems damned odd to go to all that trouble to remove the body but leave the blood, though. Timing? Tried to get back to clean up, but it was too late? Something very, very strange to hide about the body?”

Maybe just blind panic, if the murder had not been planned in advance. Miles could imagine someone who was not a spacer shoving a body out an airlock, and only then realizing what poor concealment it really was. That didn’t exactly jibe with a subsequent swift and handy outside pickup, though. And no quaddie qualified as not-a-spacer.

He sighed. “This is not getting us much forwarder. Let’s go talk to my idiots.”

Cut it in lead

I really want someone to give me Whitman as a Type1-font or perhaps even as OpenType the next time it is my birthday. No one will of course, but as they say: “if you’re going to fantasies, you’d better fantasies big.”

Colour me green

Every sound has a colour but these are different and varies from person to person, kind of like Soilent Cola in Futurama. For instance when I hear the clickety sound from a keyboard, the keys have coloured the sound in a dark gray.

The door which slams shut has two colours both of them brown in different hue. When a tape (video or cassette) is eaten by a bad player, it is red. The pounding of skin to skin is blue while if you hit the hand at the wall it is more of brick-coloured.

Cosy movie number one

This is another installment of my book entitled “It’s a weird life with Nicklas Andersson”, or I might change the title to “The small book about o(pi)nions” before I’m finished. Enough about that.

I’ve just seen the movie Pi and the extras (except the commentary track). It was actually almost as I mockingly described it below. Cosy. Not comfy though, but very cosy.

This probably says a lot more about me than about the movie itself. In a way I found the speaker voice soothing as well as showing how fucked up the main character was. The camera, the angles and so forth, was nicely done, it was skillfully treading the borderline without ever stepping over it into artsy claptrap. I need to buy this movie myself soon.

Other People I Know (tm) thought it was too much with all the numbers and equations but I don’t get that point of view. Numbers is what the plot is all about and just by adding the equations doesn’t make it “too bloody intelligent.” I’m not stupid, or so I like to think, but I’m number-blind and happen to like math. This could perhaps be one of my many paradoxes as it means I will never fully understand how to add things together from one X to the Y and the square Z times the derivation of 2X. Or something like that. It is a pain in the ass.

Anyway. Despite this I followed through the content in Pi without any problem whatsoever.

Cosier than thou

I borrowed three cosy-and-comfy movies today from Boo so my weekend is saved. In the beginning there were only meant to be two, but after I helped him toss in his new computer into his apartment — I’m sworn to secrecy about that place, so go bug someone else — I ended up with one more.

I figured I’ll begin a bit easy and then move on graciously into the more cosier movies later this evening (or perhaps even tomorrow). After all, I’ve already seen Se7en before although not with all these DVD-extras. Then Pi and last Requiem for a Dream.

7/5 -02 15:35

-- Oh yeah, you don’t have an email. Did you know that there are recites now in March on British Studies?
-- No...
-- Well, it is. The fifteenth I think.
-- Don’t forget the phonetics.
-- Is that also now in March?!
-- Yes.
-- Yeah.
-- Three exams in one month? Are they crazy?!
-- How would we know?
-- I don’t want to do three tests. How far between are they?
-- I think two of them are in the same week.
-- What... Shit. And this started out as such a great week.
[A few minutes of silence.]
-- What happened with him?
-- Shock and trauma. More coffee?
-- Sure.

7/5 -02 10:14

-- Hi. And what can I do for you?
-- I would want a chocolate ball and, a-hum, a, a glass of water.
-- Would you like anything else?
-- No thank you.
-- That would be eight kronor. (1 US$ roughly equals 10 kronor /Ed.)
[She takes out a fifty kronor note and hand it over. Inside the editor’s head a voice with a remarkable likehood of Chris Rock says “Can you change a hundred?” The editor barely manage to keep quiet but he succeed. The girl on the other side of the cash register turns to those next in line.]
-- Hi. And what can I do for you?
-- Two coffee please, nothing else.

Beside all this, it rains outside

I had planned to go away today, leave for the Big City and not be back until later this afternoon/evening. But that’s not going to happen. The books for the course where sent by regular mail, something they didn’t do before. (Twitch!) This breaks everything I had considered doing this week apart. So I’ll guess I’ll have to deal with that tomorrow (as it was not only my books in the package and those men want their books).

Instead I’ll lay at home, read William Tenn‘s collected short stories volume one, and are about to watch Yume which starts at 14:00. I guess I could be worse off.

Pushed into the clouded future

They — the forces of planning the when, where and how of tv scheduling at SVT — is evil to their rotten core. Sort of anyway. At first they hade though to show a re-run of the first season of West Wing now in March. They have of course changed their mind, and pushed it ahead a bit. Into the summer. Instead they’ll show both the first and second as reruns this summer, three nights a week up until the next season begins. But, I stutter, it is along time till then.

This is not good for my withdrawal is beginning to show. My throat hurts. It might be because of some other cause, but I take the easy way and blame whatever I want to. Can people blame disasters and catastrophes in nature on God, I can blame my sore throat on those in charge of scheduling.

A man named Bruce

I almost choked. I opened up Eudora to read todays mail as usual, but this day something was different. Real mail on the Flashgirls mailinglist, for one thing. Two of these mails had been written by someone named Bruce Campbell. Now, it turned out that it wasn’t the phoney actor from Michigan, but another Bruce from Australia. (Poor man, I bet he has heard a lot of Monty Python jokes in his life.) But anyway. The name alone made me catch my breath.

Uneventful

The Other Niklas wanted people he know to update these journalish pages more often. But I wonder. How fun is it, even though it happen to be correct and quite true to life, to read long descriptions of me reading the Merchant of Venice while occasionally taking a break to cheer me up while listening to the Frantics [new people can read and listen here].

Right, not much fun at all. My life, as it is today, is rather meaningless. I don’t even watch tv on sundays anymore, apart from the Simpsons of course. I just sit there and write small crappy texts with an average exitence of five minutes before I erase it again. This is not the kind of life that makes good writing material. I hope more things will happen next week, as they inevitable do.

How hard can it be?

This is one of mine “people are stupid and should be shot in the head”-posts. If reading about theses things is not your particular forté, then ignore it and read something else.

Yesterday, I stood there all goofylooking and waited to get inside the bus. The thing is that the door was blocked by two girls — approximately fifteen years old — who just had to be the first to enter. Why they were so keen on that, I can’t quite figure out, because they had to bicker about how to pay as their card turned out to be ineligible in this zone, which they of course was very well aware off. They stood there and held up the line for five minutes, just to make things worse it had begun to rain as well.

I mean how hard can it be to give the conductor some money and say “I want a fare to where zone #? begins, because from there I can use my card.” It shouldn’t need to take a few minutes just to search for said money in the first place. And if you do — and if you do — need to take that kind of time to do something as elementary as that, then have the money already at hand when it’s your turn to pay or align your sorry ass to the back of the queue were the rest of us won’t have to experience your stupidity.

But people, as they are idiots, don’t do this. They have to do stupid things just because they are too stupid to figure out do it right. Getting on a bus and pay shouldn’t need an IQ the size of Stephen Hawking. Even a total fuckwit should be able to do it because it is really simple, but they can’t. People are stupid and should be shot. In the head. Twice.

In theory it shouldn't be this fun

Natalie over at luminescent org linked to this poetry generator, which I must admit is shamlessly fun. It produces rather worthless poems based on a website of choice.

the choice glows and compared the shelves.
Those heard
in that I had
found among other problems. My
hands they have another book,
Wednesday,
27 Feb 02. Are allowed
to be the margin 1 Ti
Kwan Leep 2.
Internet 36 Life Shoot in
the bottom.

Just answer the questions

Joshua Allen made my day. It had been made earlier as this has been a rather good day all in all, but never the less. Ignore this as Joshua Allen is much better, as he skillfully demonstrated in the Voigt-Kampff test.