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 So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.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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The chord system

I bought a guitar and, if I may say so, I’ve made a considerable progress since Thursday. There is a fundamental flaw in this statement but that’s just nitpicking.

(I’ve actually played guitar once before, in school. We were forced to learn how to play various instruments during a year (or was it two) and I was terrible at it. I had no motivation at all. I also remember pain in my fingers afterwards so I suspect that the guitars we used back then had strings of steel. Anything to supress ideas of grandur and talent I reckon.)

This means that right now I’ve progressed far longer than I ever did before. I even remember the chords without looking in handouts on the floor. In a moment of clarity and sudden insight I decided not to learn the Swedish note and chord system, mainly because it confuses when I learn how to play songs from the Internet.

Brown envelopes

Recently, I’ve felt a sudden drop in motivation. Very little has affected me and I haven’t bothered to do anything. Something happened though, last week. I realised that I don’t like the literature course we’re currently undertaking. I don’t like it at all, and the lecturer we have just irks me. I can’t wait until the linguistics course.

Something to occupy my time and make me once again believe in humanity arrived this morning. Three envelopes, brown. Remarkable that a few stapled heaps of paper can enlighten the day that much. One of the heaps consisted of utter crap. Vile waste of paper, ink and staple. The rest ranged from good to most excellent. I think I need to start on another fanzine soon. Really soon. But this time without a deadline. It will have to take the time it will take.

In the meantime, I just found out that Spaced season two has been shipped. It will probably arrive in the middle of next week. Call of Christmas because who will need food and relatives when this show exists and can be watched over and over and over again? (The show actually made me want a bean-bag. That, if something, is sick.)

Food and text - an unhealty symbiosis

When catching up on rec.arts.sf.fandom — catching up = download lots of headers and then flush everything out but 300 or so messages — I learned something. If it’s late, don’t read things where the subject header is “googlecooking” or for that matter, anything with food. If you do, hunger will follow.

I happened to do this. Again. Just as previous experience tells me I got really hungry, but at least the time isn’t 3:00 AM this time. Having said that, this will explain why I’m trying to quench my stomach by drinking gallons of water. It’s not really working. In a way it is, but I found myself draw a silly image with food as the major theme. Food and water. [image]

It didn’t help that someone posted a recipe of something with rabbits in it. It looked good. No, better than that really. I wanted to run out and cook it right away. Two things stopped me. Number one was that I didn’t have a rabbit. The second problem was that I didn’t have rabbit number two. These two but very related problems put a stop to an otherwise damn fine plan.

No, I’d better get back to catching up. For some reason the messages keep on growing as new ones are posted. Who needs a life?

The art of how to stop

Wide shot. The sun is hovering above the road, everything is bleached so much that everything is almost white. In this vast whiteness, there are things. Things that cannot be seen because they’re quite, quite white. The sun also reflects itself in the asphalt for some reason.

In the distance, you could the noise of engine. The camera do a fade over and suddenly appears a hundred metres ahead. A tractor, old, has just made a turn and gone out in the road. As suddenly as this happened, a queue forms. A long line of cars hardly moves at all. A fade back and a new wide shot. A car comes and it does not stand still. The sun still floats in the atmosphere, all things around the hill are still white.

In this whiteness, when the car is inside it, there is a squeal. The squeal, created by tires skidding over the asphalt, continues and then there is a bump. Actually, there is more than a bump. The car can’t slow down enough, but almost. The towing hook from the car ahead is now in the front and there is a quite big dent. A big round dent.

Nicklas will now propagate for the removal of all tractors, and in the long run, even fellow drivers. This will have the positive effect of him being alone on the road. My yesterday was, as you might have guessed, fun. How was yours?

(No living things were harmed in the making of this message.)

TAWFE gathering

The Adam West Fanclub Experience had a meeting last night. We recorded “music.” When I say “music” I mean that one of us played the wrong chords on the guitar and the other one “sang.” The one that “sang” is the one same one that really can’t sing even if his life depended on it. It’s fun but we’re quite useless.

How to find things

At many searchers request (I’m not making this up) this is a guide how to find Stuff(tm) that are, through mismanagement or just plain bad luck, lost. We’ve all lost things at one time or another.

1) Declare [the thing, animal, emotion, whatever] lost. You can do this by searching the area around your feet. If it isn’t there it must be gone. But gone where?

2) When I lose things, sooner or later they usually end up on the desk. Try to search your desk for a few minutes. If you’re lucky it’s there, buried under a copy of Terry Carr’s Fandom Harvest, Boo’s Moulin Rouge dvd, twelve records from different genres, a battery charger and lots of print-outs from the latest fanzine. As you can see, everything ends up on the desk. You just have to have patience.

3) If that failed there are a few more things to do, so don’t despair just yet. Have you tried looking under the desk? I thought so. Do that and since you’re already crawling around on the ground, you can go on to search under your bed as well.

4a) Obviously, you’ve had no luck. Take a break. Have a cup of tea. While you wait, you can always search the kitchen as well. Who knows? Maybe you lost it when you where preparing a meal or two.

4b) If it is a living thing that disappeared, then you might have to search your surroundings as well. Go out through the front door and yell a bit. Wait a couple of minutes and yell some more. Who knows? It might hear you and come running into your arms, except if it is a turtle because then you might have to yell and wait a week or two instead. But normally this produces a quick result.

5) The search in the house/apartment came up empty? You clearly have lost something properly and must go out there in the real world. Visit your friends and search their living habitats. They might have borrowed it. Don’t bother asking if they’ve got it first, they might lie or simply forgot that they have it. Just show up and search.

6) Still nothing? You need to buy a new one; it’s as simple as that. There is no point in looking for it anymore. After all, you’ve wasted much time as it is already.

The latest few weeks

The last two weeks, my brain have consisted of nothing but crushed tomatoes. I’ve just sat there all the time, reading a book, sleepwalking through class or watching the same movies over and over again. It felt as if my social skills were corroding. In retrospect, it seems as if I only could speak — at great length — about the movies I had seen and/or re-watched. Well, there was that time in the phone thought, when the comic sidekick and I tried to see how low we could take our political humour. (Answer: very low indeed.)

So, right now I’m trying to get out of this disruptive pattern. I’m mainly doing so by taking a lot of photos, search for loot in bookshops (both new and used) while listening to Tegan & Sara and Aimee Mann’s new album.

I forgive him for Alien: Resurrection

First impressions of Amelie:

a) This looks good.
b) I like all those info dumps by the narrator quite a lot. Especially the like and dislike adds a quirky atmosphere to the whole movie.
c) What the hell is Jeff Noon doing in a French movie? And the Santana look-a-like as the four way talkative photo. Amazing really. Of course, the movie is quirky, so Jeff Noon wouldn’t had been totally out of place, but his evil twin probably have more acting skills than the Manchesterian author. (The evil Noon twin also rides a motorized wheelchair in Alien: Resurrection, but he isn’t quite as Noonish in that. Quite possible, he’s also appearing in all the other movies by the same director.)
d) Samuel L. Jackson has never been quite so white, so I suspect that this isn’t the same Mr Glass as in Unbreakable.
e) Trust a Frenchman to throw in some umpha-umpha accordion music in the soundtrack.
f) It’s a Damn Good Movie (tm).

Hairy beasts

Shock! Horror! awaited me. I wan’t prepared for this, not by a long shot. But there on the dvd shelf stood Human Nature. Sure, it’s been a while since the cinema release so it shouldn’t have come as a shock. As far as I’m aware, it hadn’t been released as on region one, which tends to be a month or three ahead of us here in plain old region two.

I had to buy it. It’s Charlie Kaufman (of Being John Malkovich fame) after all.

Update 18:57: I have now seen it. I liked it. It was mot quite as bizarre as BJM, but it’s still not your average run of the mill type of film. There is, I suppose, a moral to the story but it isn’t what it seemed to be. Far from it. It is not a perfect film, there are flaws as there always is. The look Rhys Ifans gives to the camera in the alley where he drinks liqour and gets a blow job is stuck in my mind even after the movies is over. You don’t pity him, you pity yourself and our species.