Strings

In general I wish I could avoid the standard kind of commercial that uses the same retarded means in a pathetic attempt to brainwash the impressionable majority. When there's a certain use of humour, and I mean good humour, not the cheap kind that has its roots in the worst clichés available, I can actually enjoy watching a commercial. Alright, so in my case it might not actually achieve what it should, i.e. make me buy the product, even if the commercial makes me laugh, and I don't know enough about sales statistics to say which manner of commercial is the most effective. But from my own egoistic point of view, all commercials should exist with the sole purpose of amusing me.

Pitch black humour is particular is a hit with me, as in this example

I was recently blessed with a lot of new additions to my audio library of various genres to stimulate my relatively undiscriminating music taste. Darn, there are lots of talented people out there, and it's a shame that not all of them get very much attention.
I was listening to an electronic duo called Akasha ... it may not be everyone's kind of music, but at least it's somewhat different. I like music that has kind of an acid feel to it.
Boduf Songs on the other hand, was in a different category. Rather quiet and relaxing lyrics accompanied by a pleasant acoustic guitar most of the time. And in yet another entirely different category, I was listening to more music by Rise Against - which is more than one case is politically motivated and great for me personally when I feel frustrated.

When it comes down to it, I just like feeling miserable. And make others feel miserable. It's my passion.

Just a...

...quick thought. I saw a bakery at a shopping mall where the sign said "Take Away". Given the nature of this kind of bakery in general, isn't that kind of message a bit redundant? Makes you think if there are similar bakeries where the bread in fact not take away.

"I'll just have a loaf of bread and a couple of buns .... could I get a bag for them?"
"Sorry sir, but you are not allowed to consume our products outside the mall, if you need accessories you will have to buy them inside the store"
"But there are no places to sit even if I wanted to eat it here"
"So sorry sir, you should have read the sign. It's not our responsibility"

Alternatively, they could have a huge "Masters of the Obvious" banner there instead.

Paradox

You know, I'm not against animal rights activists as a rule; the whole vegetarian/vegan trip is alright all around if that's the code people want to live by. But some of the arguments pro-vegetarianism are a bit skewed in my opinion, in fact they're downright discriminating.
I mean, that only humans are capable of murdering other animals in cold blood, to assume that that kind of intelligence is unique to us, that's just rude!
As far as I know there are plenty of examples of animals doing various kinds of thievery and/or murder in cold blood, and I'm not just talking about predators, which after all have to eat something. I'm talking about birds who steal each other's food, leaving the other to starve, or who kill each other to the same effect and various other species that practice cannibalism even in situations when it's not crucial to their survival.
In honesty I think it's a tired argument that animals aren't sufficiently sentient to take responsibility for their actions or that they all abide by a common instinctive code at all times.
Not only does this mistake the capabilities of certain animals, it is quite simply a statement of human supremacy to claim that humans have patented imaginative displays of cruelty! While we should take some measure of pride in having invented obscene methods of torture and phenomena like genocide, it's quite unfair to leave animals out of the game. Sadistic sentient creatures of the world unite!

On a different note, I've started watching the activities of the English TV channel Sky One more closely after they've started adapting Discworld novels as miniseries. Their adaptation of Hogfather wasn't perfect, but it was really well done under the circumstances, and while I feared the worst for their adaptation of The Colour of Magic, so far it's showing a lot of promise.

In my case it takes an intoxicated mind to fully explore the surreal potential of my dreams, which, there were quite a few interesting twists throughout the night, no single element trying to counterpoint the general feel good mood in the long and somewhat coherent dream I had. For some reason nightmares stay away in the face of beer.
Devoid of alcohol in the blood after a long night of drinking, it always feels like my body has gone through a ritual of cleansing, and I feel a lot more rested than I would otherwise feel after just 6 hours' sleep.

The mind does a sufficient amount of wandering along the clouds that are not rudely covering the entire sky, but soon plummets when the understimulated digestive system cries out for work.
When the bitter taste of beer and garlic fills your mouth in the morning, even a cup of coffee will taste ever so sweet.

Bit of the old self-indulgence

There are the varying impulses; do you write an experience down immediately, or do you wait until your head is clear? Not because of any healthy purpose or specific merit, but because of simple self-indulgence, I end up choosing to write it down immediately.
Realizing that I won't feel completely shiny when I awake, and realizing that my recent rate of alcohol and/or fast food consumption was less than nutritious, I put less artistically relevant facts aside and focus on the morning. I left my window open before I left about 18 hours ago, and to my disappointment, my breath inside my own room does not emerge as a cluster of mesmerizing crystals, but merely as a wave of steam as I watch an indifferent blackbird in the distance - and as I observe that in the very moment of its mention it takes off and starts circling the area.
It's no big country I live in, and the closer you get to the inner city, the smaller it gets. Everyone is alienated and familiar at the same time in the weekend, drinking themselves senseless and communicating with complete strangers as if making a temporary pact that underlines a drunken and superficial allegiance. The feathers that hit the ground belong to birds and people alike, a continouous hedonistic waste where the beginning or end of any kind of sense was long pushed over a cliff into a pit of spikey granite.
Yes, I write this because of the multitude of beautiful images the morning brings when, in a mournful moment, I realize that I am not greeting it as much as bidding it farewell as others are to claim it while I enter my brief hibernation.

The faces become a blur more than ever, and the pseudo-sentimental slideshow passes before my weary eyes, pretense not lessened by a state of mild intoxication.
Wishful thinking, now a few days old, did not pay off, and yet the beauty would not be the same if the air wasn't such a fine wall of ruthless frost. I tell myself that this is what I miss every morning for all my self-indulgent oversleeping when I lazily arise to enjoy merely half a day. But I have had my dose, shutting out the experience as condensed in these words to read them as if they were created by a stranger.

I won't ever be the same person when I awake as I am just before I go to sleep, and I feel thankful for it.

Weekend rant

Some people like to think of analogies for everything because, I suppose, it seems very clever with all those similies, metaphores and whatnot, but the blunt truth (as far as I think) is that a lot of analogies are complete shite. Doesn't prevent them from being amusing diversions for the mind, and I always fall into the same damnable pit, musing over the same damn details over and over, but inexplicably I don't stop enjoying it. My latest though was comparing my life to a movie script. How I'd view it if it happened to be the final draft for a movie if I were a producer. Generally a dangerous path to choose because that kind of thinking can become an easy escape. Imagining myself as a character in a movie doesn't really answer any existential questions, doesn't bring me closer to any conclusion ... and yet it can work as a device for me to see things from the outside, opting for a different perspective. Taking the analogy further, I guess a person'd wish that they were in an A-grade movie with a sense of meaning and depth without being too slow or overcontemplative. Eventually you realize that you are in fact part of a poorly written B movie with long periods of dullness and unrealistic dialogue and really bad camera angles.

A silly wish which I know will probably not be fulfilled anytime soon is to have less attractive female (or male) leads. It's not that I don't like eye-candy in general, but it's strange how successful characters usually by pure coincidence are drop-dead gorgeous or frightening handsome. That's how successful people look! Apparently. Even the most geeky computer nerd will have designer glasses and a perfect haircut. And all those movies where the lead actress is genetically bred to wear permanent make-up. Scarlett Johansen does not need total make-up to look pretty! Some is alright, especially for technical reasons regarding lighting etc. but too much and it can be the cause of serious eye-sore. I also hate it when they place a rather fine actress in a role only to use her looks instead of challenging their acting skills.

But I guess if they want a movie to earn some money they need to front it with some pretty faces.

End of rant.

Simplicity

A brief Winter night descends in the middle of a manically depressed version of March that has so far made me believe that I live in some alternate dimension where the weather sucks all year. Still, a bit of frost and snow lightens the mood a bit, as if the strangely extended Autumn has finally loosened its grip on Winter, allowing the tortured season to say its last goodbye before Spring takes over. The reflections of street light in those fine layers of ice light up the pavement as you walk, and light reflected in the snow at the sky makes the night seem brighter. I remember past years of my life where the sunlight lit up the day in the middle of March, clouds spreading to reveal a blue sky and flowers blossoming early, but this year the weather has seemed absolutely bipolar.
I take in some full breaths of the cold evening air, savouring its simple beauty, yet longing for warmth and green trees. I want to ride my bicycle without having to wear a jacket, I want to sit in the park and read a book quietly. I want to be able to feel a touch of Summer before the wrong sort of pollen goes airborne and makes my allergies go crazy and makes me want to rip out my throat because of the constant itch. Best not to think about that quite yet...
For now I'll just let music fill my ears in those few blissful moments before I go to sleep

Easter fiction

While Danish weather is manically depressed and can't seem to find psychiatric assistance, clouds, rain and wind have to serve as the only source of inspiration to find when I look out of my window. It is a lazy day; Easter holidays have begun, time being the most abundant resource at the moment. Too many books want to be read... both the traditional and the interactive sort.
A lot has already been said about whether or not computer games can be art, and in truth I can add very little to that discussion... To me a really good game is like a painting that I can enter and interact with or a book in which I take control. As rewarding as regular reading is, sometimes it's a real treat to just sit back and process the images of a pre-rendered world. There's the occasional trap of course, such as Guitar Hero... which is sort of amusing, but when you keep playing the same song over and over just to get a better score, it becomes an unhealthy addiction, very different from an engrossing role-playing game where you have an active influence on your environment.
Most gamers owe it to themselves to check out the rave-worthy game Audiosurf - has been out for a little while - which unfortunately is only available over Steam
It's fairly cheap though and is honestly the most relaxing way of listening to music. Basically you control a little craft that flies on a road that varies depending on the intensity of the song - any song you have on your computer. There's more to it than that, but it's hard to explain every aspect of it. The graphics are simple, but still beautiful. Whenever I want some relaxing stimulation of my brain, I just pick a song and off I go.
It's certainly an alternative to games like Guitar Hero where the number of available songs is very limited.

Also, a completely different thought... Space ships in science fiction... why do they go down when their engine fails? I know there is something called gravity which may be a perfect explanation when you're above a planet, but when you're in the middle of space? Apparently space ships have some extra devices for downwards propulsion that kick in once the main engines are dead.
And how did they construct some über space station like the death star without having smaller point defence systems with homing missiles to shoot any planes that went for the "We have no weaknesses, so we'll make this vulnerable spot"? It's one of the reasons I don't often read science fiction. Magic is something I can handle.. it's metaphysical and therefore the regular laws of physics and reason don't apply to it. It's alright that science fiction does a lot of things that aren't possible, that's the whole point after all, but sometimes it just doesn't make any sort of sense.
Maybe it's because I generally avoid bad fantasy - except the kind I sometimes write in my spare time - and have mostly been looking at bad science fiction. What I like in a work of science fiction or literature is a degree of realism in anything that isn't affected by rules of physics that are unique to the setting. There has to be a sense of urgency and sacrifice... the best work of science fiction I've ever read ended with a complete apocalyptic disaster... that kind of thing is awe-inspiring and terrifying like a tidal wave.

TV + Superhero wannabes = miniskirts and hot pants

Between weathering the political storm as presented in newspapers and TV and making every possible attempt not to do anything productive, I found myself in the deepest parts of the gutter of my mind, probing around for anything that could divert my attention and inspire creativity.
All I found was the collective leftovers from last night's contemplations, which were pretty crude and mainly centered around the reality TV-show "Who Wants To Be A Superhero", the concept of which is that a bunch of geeks, morons and bimbos get to do ridiculous clothing (in the case of the bimbos, considerably less). This is roleplaying taken to another level, although it's obvious that some people take it more seriously than others. What I did not at all fathom was how a seriously overweight woman, who had named her alter ego "Fat Momma" - a super hero who gets her power from eating doughnuts - made it to be a part of the final bunch that was left after an army of other idiots were turned down. I have deep respect for Stan Lee and all that he has done for the comic book world, but whatever was going on in his mind when he did the casting is just an absolute mystery. I guess he thought it was safe to include her seeing as she's going to be thrown out eventually, but having a superhero who, in a Western culture where obesity is a prime disease, gets her powers from getting even fatter than she already is, will perhaps not send the most productive message to all the kids who are watching the show. Then again, considering the vast numbers of completely ridiculous superheroes featured in comic books across the world, the character of Fat Momma isn't all that farfetched. For example, standard weed is nothing compared to the stuff smoked by some of the people who wrote for the X-men series. The whole concept of mutation and such is rather neat, but even a world rich in imagination needs some boundaries, otherwise it's just nonsensical chaos.

Of course, I'll get addicted to watching the misery of these would-be heroes (or, in some cases, would-be villains) because I'm just that low. With great anticipation will I observe the adventures of The Iron Enforcer, Feedback, Major Victory, Monkey Woman (!!!!!), Cell Phone Girl(?!) and others if I can find the episodes. After all, the series has apparently been going on since mid-2006.

Also, I've been watching Life on Mars. Which is actually an interesting series, the plot of which I won't spoil (I can leave that to Wikipedia).

The Internet is stupid...

Well, not really, but damn, whenever I do something really stupid all I have to do is browse user comments on YouTube, Imdb or some other website where people who can't get anyone else to listen to their opinions post their perspectives on the world, and suddenly I feel extremely clever by comparison. There's seriously a cornucopia of entertainment. In particular, go look at really good movies on Imdb, and read some of the negative reviews that people have posted. I mean, I respect the right to an opinion and all, but some people seem to think that perfect spelling and punctuation grants them God status and makes every single word they write absolutely infallible. The amount of pretentious shit you get there is absolutely mind-boggling to say the least. But whenever you're looking for answers, you can be very certain that there's a whole multimillion panel of rabid self-appointed experts who are hungry for your questions, and have one and all independently invented the Philosopher's Stone.

Another absolute favourite is looking at videos of various guitarists on YouTube. You see a recording of a guy who's doing some pretty amazing things on his guitar, and then there's a horde of people standing in line to claim that he's an amateur and is surpassed by at least several others, after which they name their own favourites. Even if the guitarist is someone who is renowned among some of his top professional colleagues. Of course, they, too, are entitled to an opinion, but an attitude I just can't stand is the "categorically unimpressed" one. If you believe yourself beyond impression or surprise, you're either some kind of God or an absolute moron. Let's say there was an objective way of determining the skill of a guitarist. If someone by that method was determined to be number 100 in the world, I'd personally still be damned impressed. I can listen to a skilled guy playing the guitar and think "Damn, I don't like the sound of that", but I won't use that as an argument for claiming that he can't play his instrument. He just doesn't play it the way I prefer. Thankfully there's a near equal amount of people present on YouTube to write equally amusing replies to all those morons. And of course, nothing cheers me up more than seeing the suffering of those that don't share my opinions.

Trail-offs and punctuation...

Do you ever think about punctuation in IM conversations? No? Yes?

Either way, I think I made the mistake of doing just that. The thing is, when you are talking to someone over MSN or whatnot, unless you are using a webcam, it is a bit difficult to read facial expressions or body language. You can't necessarily determine the other person's mood, except when he/she is saying it directly. Of course, as in any normal conversation when someone has been asked if they are feeling alright, they might not give an honest answer, especially if they're extremely depressed. But from what I've seen so far it's sometimes possible to read someone's mood from the way they write. In a world of communication where long strings of non-capital letters and lacking punctuation are pretty common phenomeons, every full stop, comma or capital letter can be used as a weapon.

People who would normally skip the capital letters altogether will suddenly put one in the beginning of their IMs and start finishing each sentence with a full stop.
What could have been a casual greeting from one person to another, a " hey :-) ", suddenly turns into a passive-aggressive "Hi." Maybe this is just my weird, overanalyzing mind, but the full-stop in such a short message is almost like a landmine. It makes me tread carefully when I respond; in fact it almost discourages response, effectively killing the flow of conversation before it has even begun.
Some people can read a person's personality from their handwriting. I believe it's possible to an extent - not to the same extent as with handwriting - to tell something about a person judging by their sentence structure and choice of punctuation in IM conversations. This is only a theory, however, and its exploration would probably require elaborate studies. It wouldn't surprise me if someone else had already made such. You can sometimes tell if an individual (like me) is a grammar fetishist. Of course, some people who really are grammar fetishists use MSN as a place where it's okay to just relax and not be too serious about the formal aspects of writing. Some would choose to view lacking capitalization as a sign of sloppiness, while others would interpret it as a sign of a healthy, laid-back person.
In addition to this we have smileys, abbreviation fillers and trail-offs...
The trail-off is a phenomenon which, I think, has simply become a habit to many of us, a trail-off being a series of dots (often three) to follow a sentence. Like a lot of smileys, the trail-off is highly context sensitive, i.e. "We could watch a movie tonight..." where it makes the sentence just hang in the air as a suggestion. Though what I think is that the trail-off often tends to make a sentence seem like the writer is out of breath. "I'm doing fine..." feels like it's leaving out a major "...but..."
It's an uncertain or half-hearted sentence. "That's definitely a possibility..." as opposed to "that's definitely a possibility :-)"
I mentioned abbreviation fillers, examples of which are "lol" and "rofl". Their overutilization in games like World of Warcraft and other places of the web might generate the prejudice that people who use them all the time are retards. They work well on occasion when used appropriately, but if they're used all the time it just feels like the person in question has nothing else to say. And then again there are some people who feel that smileys should be obliterated forever.

I'm sure a lot of people have thought about all this before, this was just my personal rant about a highly subjective topic.

He's sort of beginning to consider, no, yes, ponder... Seeing the blooms everywhere, finding himself waiting for them to wither and die along with the frail signs of an upcoming Spring. He drinks way too strong coffee and dreams of a day when anxiety attacks aren't lurking around the corner. Perfect colours don't mix well in his nightmares, he can't take the pressure and reverts to black and white - there's that rare moment when he finds company a gift; the paradox of a person who feels lonely, but at the same time is addicted to solitude. Contemplates blowing the dust off a book he should have read a while ago, but he can't find the courage to open it.

He'd drift off to sleep if he felt tired enough, but he's being kept awake by the smile of a woman whose face he can't recall. Maybe she's just a conjuration of his own imagination, maybe she's his way of compensating for his social void. The chalice is filled with the wine that could drive the image out of his mind, but he doesn't drink it because every time he does, the image is merely amplified.

In the end he tells the image to go fuck itself as he turns up the volume until her voice can't be heard anymore.