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 So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.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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New camera

While I’ve yet to master it completely, I’m still used to the LCD-viewfinder in the old camera, Canon S50 is wonderful. Smaller and thus much easier to carry around. Something at least I consider the most important bit about a camera. Well, it should also take pictures.

Angel season 4

March the first 2004. All those with region 2 compatible dvd-player, write down that date and pray nothing happens. Because I want season four of Angel as soon as possible. That wait has been an experience of withdrawal, agony and foul language. [Whedonesque]

Blurbism

The photographs at Blurbism is a bit better than mine, and borders to amazing. It’s almost possible to actually smell the pavement and feel all the broken bottles. The cityscape he puts on display is the one that’s worndown and with imperfections. Neat.

Last Unicorn Art

Last Unicorn concept art, which reminds me I must read Peter S. Beagle’s book now that it’s within an arms reach. It’s there, right there on the shelf. See? I’ve heard that it’s quite good. [Found at Coudal Partners]

A Big Book

Speak Up made me aware of Michael Hawley’s book. It’s quite a big book (152,4 x 111,76 x 15,24 cm) and I want to know how the hell they made it. Where did thay print it? What paper did they use? How do one carry it in the backpack?

Needless to say, no one I know can afford it since it’s priced to a whopping $10 000 — you know, for charity. But damn. The book is huge. Huge! Does there exist a bookcase out there that can handle it without much hassle? I suspect not.

This is about christmas

My mother (and I think my brother was in on the whole deal as well) gave me these slippers, furry and with silly claws. Sadly not bunnyshaped but those seem to be a real bitch to find nowadays — if they’re to be the real pastywhite variety that is. And I will not say anything about Christmas because if I do, some other being at svartanka.com will inevitably bring up his and the entire week will be spent in laughter and comparisons about who had it worse. (The real reason is that this year I would have lost. I tried to sleep and keep out of the way. It worked too until the discman drained the batteries in the middle of Allison (”keeps a smile / around a while / he took no fright / and jettisoned / we’ll go tonight / to hear him tell / “oh well” / allison / allison”).)

Now, free from everyone but the emediate family, let’s survive until tomorrow. Yeah, let’s just do that. Just.

(If I don’t buy many movies or books this month, I can afford a new camera. I think I’ll do that.)

2003 in bullets but not

Nothing new will happen at all from here ‘till the new year, so might as well just get it out of my system. Time to sum up the year, and this time I’m going to do it properly. I’ll count everything, including things that I’ve rewatched, reread and relistened to — because hey! I’ve experienced those this year as well.

Best music: Hard. It’s either Tegan & Sara’ “This Business of Art”, the Kills’ “Get on Our Mean Side” or the Pixies “Doolittle.” Maybe White Stripes’ “Elephant” too, but I’ve not listen to it nearly as much as the other three.

Film: This is tough. Several things to choose from and among them movies such as The Last Wave, Adaptation, Withnail & I. Which to choose? Damnit. And I did re-watch Clerks too. Arrgh.

Tv-show: Fire-fucking-fly. Character-driven western in space masterminded by Joss Whedon. How can you beat it? The only possible way is to actually pick the show up and produce mer episodes, since Fox — stupid Fox — cancelled it. (The Dead Zone is quite brilliant too but pales in the shadow of Firefly.)

Book: “Dance Dance Dance” by Haruki Murakami. “Master & Commander” by Patrick O’Brian, “Quicksilver” by Neal Stephenson and “Miss Wyoming” by Douglas Coupland coming up close second. In the biography department: Toby Young’s “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” and Hunter S. Thompson’s “Kingdom of Fear” are both excellent.

Comic: The Invisibles. It’s ‘masing. Why haven’t I read it earlier?

Website: Lostbrain, Flakmag, Knotmag, Black Table and as always Whygodwhy.

Nothing to do with Christmas

I know. I know. Lost Pages are turning into some sort of journal for my demented mind, but I’m actually quite comfortable with that since the world-wide computer network called the Internet is quite boring right now. At least in my sky and I don’t feel like powersurfing. And just to continue right off.

I’ve been listening a lot to the Pixies the last few... heck, it’s been a year already? Well. Before a few days ago, I hadn’t heard either the b-sides nor Bossanova. Excellent both of them and they do something to my brain, I evesdropped on my thoughts and they do sound a lot like Frank Black lyrics. Not sure it’s a good thing, but I guess not.

Very nonsenseical with weird rythm and kind of chopped up and they don’t make sense. Which is important enough to repeat twice in the previous sentense.

Oh, and I want a new camera. Everything is Tommy’s fault. Damn him and his free magazines.

The defunct bad movie saturday

Been busy. We had planned to see a lot of bad movies and that didn’t quite happen. We did see the second collection of episodes from Grand Slam (imdb). The two episodes were not good and the acting was even worse than I remembered. But it was, in a weird way, fun. Then it all got out of hand. I blame the beer and Whisky.

American Wedding (imdb) was hilarious. The humour was so low that I recon you need a shovel to dig a hole to get any further down, but it didn’t matter. It had a larger portion of Seann William Scott than I expected, and that isn’t bad.

Death to Smoochy (imdb) had a lot of fantastic things, such as script, acting, and production design. The only fault was that the filming of it was dull. Very much of it was standard, mediocre image composition. However, Williams and Norton managed to lift it way, way up. All in all, this might be the best Roald Dahl filmatisation ever, even though he had nothing at all to do with it. Go figure.

Old School (imdb). Here my mind starts to get a bit fuzzy. I don’t remember much of the second half, probably because we talked instead of watched the movie. Seann William Scott is a genius though, just as Will Ferrell.

And we forgot to watch Remo. Damnit.

Linked

I found a link from Hatch Magazine‘s bloglinks. I’ve never seen before in my life. So I probed around a bit to see what I could find.

Founded in July 2003 and officially launched in October 2003, Hatch is a magazine and forum to discuss real life issues related to careers, shelter, money, education, health, culture and beyond. Issues which many people in their 20s and 30s are facing.

And all I can think of is why did they link to me? While I do try to get educated, it is in an area that has not much real-life application, and as for career, money, health, shelter? What? So I guess it must be because of I write about the important stuff such as books, comics, tv, movies, music, photography and the silly life of a social (sort of) recluse (it’s hard to be that properly when sharing a house with three other people).

This phrase, also from their aboot-page:

From graduating college and forging a career path, to finding an apartment or house, to getting engaged, married or starting a family — and all that comes in between — we are all hatching.

I don’t want to deal with any of those issues. They’re... No.

But it’s not at all humbling to appear on the same link-list as Dooce, Zulkey, psionic and Loobylu. They write far better then I do, so this is more likely to give me megalomania and an attack of grandeur delusions of destined greatness. It also gave me an opportunity to just ramble along in a thinly disguised link-entry.

(How the magazine is? Don’t know. Didn’t probe the articles. Perhaps I should have.)

(Update 18/12 11:56 — it turns out they had seen me a mail as well earlier but it was caught in the spam-filter. I think I have to check the whole thing out now.)

Christmas Ficus

Here is the time-honoured tradition of the Andersson household, the Christmas Ficus (plastic):

Once More with Hobbits

Some crazy fucker has turned Buffy’s Once More With Feeling into a Lord of the Rings Musical. And I mean “fucker” in the nicest way because it’s just marvelous and wonderful and completely bonkers idea. And I say this without being a huge Tolkien fan. I don’t like the books and the movies are nice and so but nothing more. So let us all hear a loud cheer for crazy people. Hurrah! Just go and read the redone lyrics to “Walk through the fire” already. Gosh. Wow.

Christmas holiday

Feeling wonky. Tomorrow I head down south, to where I’m local. I’ll be there visiting the parental units until early January. This means that... I’ll continue to update because Christmas isn’t such a big deal. It doesn’t force me to stop and sit down and be wholesome with the relatives and sing Christmasy songs infront of a large wooden chip called Christmas tree. It’s just another day of the year, kind of like the first of May except with more snow and less angry socialists.

The next entry here will probably either be the usual gibberish or about the Bad Movie Saturday. Having said that, I suspect that I’ll feel gibberish tomorrow after the train ride.

But right now I’m going to watch Back to the Future (imdb).

Daleks of the Ring

If the Lord of the Rings-movies really is about the big battle between the good and the ultimate evil, then where are the Daleks? They’re after all Very Evil, even more-so than Sauron. When something needs to be killed, you don’t send a couple of puny half-assed orcs. No, you send those who have sworn to exterminate everything not Dalek because then there will be no mistakes. No one will be offered cake since that just don’t mesh with the Dalek point of view.

Speech-impaired

All this phonetic and phonology lately (passed the exam today, who-ho-ie) have made me realise two things. Phonology is pretty neat — much more fun than phonetics and transcriptions — and speech is not very efficient. I have lots of thoughts intervening in double helixes and even a twine-ball, and at the same time I can only say one of them. I can of course wait until I’ve said one thing, but then my mind is filled with other thoughts and my mind at times just goes pffft (plosive-bilabial (-> possibly a click sound here) -> fricative-labiodental -> voiced-fricative-dental) and implodes like a baby orange with a sudden case of “not properly contained vacuum in the middle”-disorder. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? I know I do.

In the magazine heap

Black Table had a rundown on magazines. Far too few of them, but no matter. A magazine is a magazine, and some of us like the little buggers. Sadly, they affirmed my suspicions about The Believer not being a real Might Magazine substitute. Sadly, because what I’ve read from Might was damn good.

Hail the snowman

Snowman, that classic anthropomorphic trio of large, medium, and small balls of snow, armed with sticks and eyes of coal, a friendly winter face to all passersby, grinning broadly beneath a long, carrot nose! Hail, snowman!

There’s no way of actually stop it from coming. The snow I mean. And with the snow we also get a new endangered species. Thanks to the Morning News, there might yet be time enough to save the snowman. Be warned though. Snowmen are not for the faint-hearted, saving them can be dangerous to your health.

Powers New Book Update #999

Tim Powers update (from the timpowers mailinglist at Yahoo): “So far the only big event is that somebody’s VCR burned up a videotape of _Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure_ that they were trying to watch.” Having said that, I’m sure the book will be weird and facinating and just as Tim Powery as we expect — but in a whole other way of course. His research contains Kaballah, the Deep Sea Scrolls, and a few biographies about Einstein. He insists that this “implies a much more lively and fascinating book than the one I’m actually writing.” I bet he’s wrong, but since I’m a huge fan you might be a bit sceptical about this if you like (to be wrong).

A written monologue about early mornings

-- I’m up by nine although I don’t have to, and everything is kind of sleepy and sort of runs together in the blurred edges because I couldn’t get to sleep until three am even thought I tried really hard, but so far I must say that I like it; it is not as if I haven’t done this before — it was just a long long time ago and I’ve sort of forgotten the feeling, the feeling of actually having a whole day ahead, and it’s a bit daunting I guess, but I’ll rise up to the occasion and just embrace it and enjoy it as much as I can; I must do this again but without all the grammar mistakes and the horrible punctuation because when I look back at what I’ve written I’m mortified, really, especially since this is supposed to be some sort of monologesque thing and it’s hard to speak like this without even one full stop

what happens down south

I spoke to my family on the phone today. I don’t know what they wanted, but I guess they just wanted to check in that I still remember that I’ll go down there this Wednesday.

They seemed fine, although I suspect my brother will have gone extinct sometime after the phone call. He was in the background, fighting with my father over the right to own and use the remote control like an invading colonist. Not a wise thing to do. It’s on the checklist over things not to do in that house, just between “Throw satsumas on Lind” — because she will strike down with great vengeance and furious anger — and “Touching the Christmas ficus.” I expect there will be grenade holes in the cellar and a guerrilla army hiding under the stairway.

I wonder if I’ll survive this...

Firefly sing-a-long

I have the house all to myself today, or at least that’s how it seems. All other beings are away. So, I’ve whipped out the guitar from under my bead and tried, sad sad fanboy that I am, to play the Firefly Theme song. I know. Pathetic much? However, judging from the Firefly commentary tracks, Nathan Fillion is possessed by the theme so I guess I’m not worst off. The only problem is that I have to ignore the bluesy bits, because no one has bothered to tab them down and I’m not good at that myself. (Who am I kidding? Even if they were, I probably wouldn’t be able to play them.)

(taken from some Firefly messageboard)
Firefly Theme
written by Joss Whedon
sung by Sonny Rhodes
tabbed/chorded by Joe Dizzy


Intro:
D----------0--3p0---0-
A-----0h3---------3----
E-----------------------


[D]Take my love
[C]Take my land
[G]Take me where I [F]cannot [C]stand


(bluesy western thing)


[F]I don’t care
[C]I’m still free
[G]You can’t take the [D]sky from me


(bluesy western thing)


Take me out
To the black
Tell ‘em I ain’t coming back


(bluesy western thing)


Burn the land
And boil the sea
You can’t take the sky from me


(bluesy western solo)


Have no place
I can be
Since I found Serenity


(bluesy western thing)


But [F]you can’t take the [C]sky from me


(bluesy western end thing)

Perhaps I should mutilate the Jayne-song as well? It’s longer and more folky so it should be easier. Note the should.

Under the ground of London

London Underground is a rather weird place. The tube is not the only thing below ground. Lots of other projects and buildings hide down there as well. Bomb shelters, pneumatic railways, rogue rivers and remains of the Roman city. But if you must have things connected to the tube, there are about 30 ghost stations, ready to shunt your opponent.

[From Kevan the nomic]

Empathic behaviour

Look! A real human being with empathy. Those are rare. Most people nowadays tends to be more along the line of “I don’t give a flying fuck about anyone but me,” or “Ahhh! Stay away, don’t look at me. I’m not here!” like me. More people should be like Rabi, even though it might seem hard.

The Food Deal

I can understand the pleasures of good food, but doesn’t this whole eat for survival bit seem a bit hokey? To my mind, photosyntesis and beer should work just as fine...

The UEB book hunt

Sometimes the timing is impeccable. I had ordered Emma who Saved My Life, the only book by Wilton Barnhardt that I didn’t have, from the UEB. All in hopes that they’d be able to succeed where everyone else had failed. It’s apparently not an easy book to get a hold of. Today, they had it in. Today, and not in January as I had planned it. Today. Damn. Now it’s there, taunting me until I return after the holiday, hiding in their shelf behind the counter. But still, they managed to get it, which says a whole lot.

sunset

I’d just been at the post office to pick up the Firefly dvd-box, which Swedisc had sent as a registered letter. This meant that in order to get it, I had to show some form of ID. This made me unable to have it delivered to my door by regular mail until friday, and I just couldn’t wait that long. Nevermind that the post office is far, far away on the other side of town — for some reason.

Anyway, when I walked there I saw an amazing sunset. It was a bit like those old movies where the bad guy hides out in his oil field and Eddie Murphy comes along and shots everyone. Except that this experience was much prettier than those movies.

Fill the Notebook

Over to the left, but not quite across the pond, Barbelith Underground has an interesting thing going on as we speak. Barbeliths Wandering Notebook (membership needed but that’s a positive thing).

Kegboy: “Ok. So after much yakityyak in the Notebook thread in Conversation some genius decided that a Barbbook should be created wherein person A writes, draws,cuts and glues or whatever into a notebook. Once thats done the person sends it on to person B who does likewise and then sends it on to C and so on and so on.. Now here’s the ideas...”

I like this. It’s sort of a fragmented fanzine with participants from all corners of the world and a nice deadline when the notebook arrives. No real stress involved.

On the function of families

It is my belief that families are some sort of test. They give it their best shot to grind you down. People with lots of relatives have better karma and resistance, it takes more work to break them. Other people — those like me with only a few relatives — don’t really need this test, it’s just that it would be suspicious otherwise. You see, we’re doomed from the start.

Spammers are insane

Go a spam that said that whatever they were offering, it could “Turn Back the Clock 10-20 Years!” and that this was a good thing. What where they thinking? No, of course. It’s spam so they’re not thinking at all. But turn back the clock 10-20 years? That would mean that I would have to re-live puberty and high school. Insanity. However, this has provided enough of evidence so that spammers could be locked away in an asylum for a long, long time.

The Yearly Goats Entry

At times Goats takes a plunge into the shallow boring end of the comedy pool. Boring in the relative sort of way, Goats never fails completely. But always, it soon goes back out there into the deep end with a lopped of shotgun shooting the bystanders.

Diablo wants a offspring to inherit his estate of Evil. “And for this unholy child I will purchase an Ikea bedroom set” and “I figure if you’re going to make a baby it needs to be made from high-quality parts” creates a disturbing image. (Perhaps not as disturbing as the ironic discussion between Jon and Philip earlier this year — but I hope it will be just as funny.)

Oh, and Goats now has an RSS feed. If I could be bothered to get a decent RSS-reader I would be ecstatic. Or perhaps not. Call me old-fashioned or retro-fascist if you like, I still won’t go crazy over this stuff.

got all the snow we need

Outside, there’s even more snow now. For a while it was gone. No snow at all. A bit of rain but nothing heavy. Now, snow. Snow looks nice, and I have to admit that it’s a better option than the unbearable summer heat. After all, you can always add more clothes during winter but during the summer you can only remove a certain number before you run out of things to remove — and then it still isn’t enough. But that still doesn’t make it a good idea.

Snow and lots of it. It still drift downwards. Why? We got all the snow we could possibly need for the time being. So stop it. Woho-wa. It just did.

PKD

The Philip K. Dick-site have gon through a change. Fan-related material has been moved to the www.philipkdickfans.com while the old site will focus more on PKD’s own stuff.

And this is very intersting:

His three children, Laura, Isa and Christopher make up the Philip K. Dick Trust. In celebration of the launch, they are making available online previously unpublished writings and other content from Mr. Dick’s voluminous archives. This includes illuminating letters, family photographs, “Blade Runner” concept sketches given to Dick by the movie studio, an unwritten book proposal, rare interviews, and pages from the Exegesis - the holy grail of Philip K. Dick musings which has only been published in excerpts.

Oh, and there’s a movie-adaptation spotlight in Wired.

christmas cards from Lance

Lance Arthur wanted to help spread the Christmas spirit all over the Internet this year, and his electric Christmas cards is a step in the right direction. At least if you believe that the spirit is not only to be beaten with frozen meat, but also to be drowned in bad taste.

Die!

About First Tuesday of the Month Uppsala pub gatherings this month: Only a fool engage in a two-front war, but those where my French Fries damnit. The blood wasn’t mine. However, the pepsi was mine, and I’m not sure if the war to keep my food was worth the loss of half of it.