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 So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.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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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.

A Mojo

After watching the extras (more specifically I’m referring to the Thompson-Depp correspondence) on the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas DVD, I’m hell-bent to get a Mojo. Not the sexual innuendo liquid from the Austin Powers movies, but one of those paper-eating monsters towering thirty centimetres above the table that they later retconed and sold to the public as a fax machine. Personally, I think Mojo sounds better. Not as sterile and more in tune with the possibilities of using it in new personal ways. From scribbling down words with a big black marker to typing out pages on a printer. (The last option is of course the most boring one can make. Letters written on typewriters on the other hand are ok.)

Thankfully, if you’re content not getting a state of the art model they’re not too expensive. After that, all you need is someone to write a fax-to-blog-plugin and I’m all set.

Shutdown

Something went wrong. The slaptop choked and destroyed a cluster that contained something important. Windows died, stuttered on the same place as if it where desperate for air. I tired to re-format and it chgoked on the same place.

trying to fix error.

It didn’t succed. It came to halt within a half an hour. Damn, damn, damn. I need a new HD. Right now, I’m trying to get used to the normal keyboard again. It feels awkward and the windows-key is in the wrong place. Irritating is another word, as the slaptop is now rendered useless and I have (now anyway) no way of getting anything of it. I need an 2,5-to-3,5 adapter so that I at least can salvage everything I want to keep.

Damn. The fanzine! I need that adapter faster than a speeding bullet.

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.

Almost everything works

Installed win2000 on the slaptop, and despite two things everything is better than fine. I might need to update SLRN — newsreader par excellence — and then hopefully only th trouble with dual screens persist. (Anyone know how to get w2000 to accept the fact that the graphic card actually can have two screens to the same card?)

But others work, directly without much tinkering. This can’t be true, karma needs balance, and with Microsoft it needs big leveling. This is not how it supposed to be. Well, actually it is, but not with Windows.

Wierdest definition of fanzine yet

There is a magazine in Sweden — which I won’t mention by name in protest — that calls itself fanzine. This is wrong on so many levels. For the first, it is suffering from the Wired-ad syndrome. You know what I mean? That the articles disappear among all the ads and that even the content-listing is divided by this. Everything is in four-colour print and on a glossy paper. Tell me, is this a fanzine?

Obviously, there can be only one answer to this question and that is a firm no. Several of them live on this magazine, so it can’t even be called a semiprozine. A fanzine is not a name for the genre “we’ll write about everything we want to write about,” something they seem to believe. A fanzine is something else, copied on a regular xerox-machine and written just for the enjoyment of it without any thoughts of professionalism.

According to me, one shouldn’t even have to pay at all for fanzines but that might just be me. If they cost money, they should be fairly periodical as one issue a week or so.

The copier

Once upon in time, things really were what they were called. One such thing was the photocopier. A small box that actually photoed the paper and then developed the paper in the box. The amazing part is this:

From the promotional literature, it’s clear that the principal practical advantage of the machine is its portability (”Fits in briefcase!”) and convenience (”less than 7 lbs!”) and literal flexibility — the plastic cushion allows the photographic paper to “match the *contour* of the material being copied” (emphasis original), hence, presumably, the name “Contoura”. This, coupled with the error-free nature of photocopying, makes quite a sales pitch.

Xerox-makers; learn. Just because it works doesn’t mean it have to cost thousands.

Trash Friday?

I came by something rather disturbing in Saturday’s newspaper — in a way, it reminds me of the Trash Friday-episode of The West Wing. The 6th December the goons of hazard in EU meet and decide what they already seem to agree about: a no more privacy act.

Information about phone calls, email, web surfing and fax transmissions in the EU-countries will be available to the police and justice departments. Exactly what information they will store and search for has yet to be told, but they will probably scan email and install some Echelon wiretap-system. The previous laws that ensured protection of privacy and personal id-information will now be rewritten, probably even seriously weakened.

They claim it is for tracking eventual terrorists — but when I think of how the cops here have acted this autumn, I do not feel assured or particularly safe. Quite the opposite.

Repeat after me: ignore the bad transmission

How am I supposed to get any work done on my essay when crap like She’s All That is on tv? It’s annoying, because it is bad and therefore I must watch. It’s a compulsion. When I die, I’ll go to bad movie heaven, where there is no God. Only heaps of bad movies that will last for maybe two eternities if I’m lucky.

Now, I don’t really have time for this because I want to pass the damn thing. Right now its going slow, a slug could type faster. Besides, the mythology part of semiotics is the most fickle grey mass of ambiguous ramblings I have ever seen in my life. Well, there was that lecture in last November, I still do not understand what it was all about.

“The myths which are generated in a culture will change over time, and can only acquire their force because they relate to a certain context. In myth, the context and history of the signs are narrowed down and contained so that only a few features of their context and history have a signifying function.”
Media Semiotics by Jonathan Bignell (p.23)>

No, sorry but I want to be honest. I lied before, the exam is not damned; it’s quite the opposite. Semiotics is pretty cool, neat, groovy, and other out-of-date expressions that are synonymous with niftiness. At least if done on my own terms, which if I might add, this isn’t.

Most of the semiotic-books are clear on the importance of text and letters, but they seem to have forgotten one very important part. The font. Nowhere they mention that the typeface also matters in how certain things are perceived. I mean, no one would take a warning seriously if it was typed with a script font such as Avalon. Right?