I really like the BBC show “Sherlock”, you know the one with Benedict. Somehow I had completely missed the 4th “season” that came out in January! I type “season” in quotes since it’s just 3 episodes! I don’t know why I had no clue but by the time I found out it was available on Amazon so ordered it right away. So far only seen the first episode – really like it! They still have that special cinematography going on that I love! I can’t really decide if I want them to make more episodes or keep it to 3-4 every second year since that makes it kind of “special” when new episodes do come out? The other Sherlock show, “Elementary” with Jonny Lee Miller, is pretty damn good too but they make 25 episodes per year so they don’t feel so special!
Also saw “The Arrival” the other day. I missed it when it was on the big screen so had to make do with my TV at home. I expected a really good sci-fi movie about first contact with another species. Instead I got a really good sci-fi movie about .. well I can’t really tell you that but it’s a funny idea and a good twist! I really do love it when sci-fi movies are able to make the sci-fi take the backseat and the human heart & spirit in focus like this! Really well done! Can really recommend this one!
Also saw “The Girl on the Train”. That movie was sooooo very slow that it was hard to stay awake at times and it wasn’t that “different” than any other movie where guys are assholes. But the one great thing about this was Emily Blunt that was absolutely fantastic! Haven’t really seen her in anything that made me go “wow” before but in this role it was definitely “wow!”. So if you want to see good acting, see it. If not, don’t.
Now you know I’m not the nationalistic type, right? I’m one of those “we are all citizens of the Earth, why can’t we all just get along”. It’s one of the reasons I wonder why countries think they can negotiate environment treaties between eachother – I mean when the Earth goes to hell it’s not going to care where your borders are!
Anyway, I digress. So it may come as a surprise to you that I was happily watching and really enjoying the Eurovision this year – and feeling totally proud of being a Swede!!!
First, let me start off by saying that yes, I do watch the Eurovision although I do avoid the Swedish “Melodifestival” like the plague. I usually don’t make an event out of Eurovision saturday but for a few years now we’ve started a tradition with a friend of Helena and her husband who comes over on the saturday of the finale for BBQ, relaxing in the spa, enjoying the show and sleeping over. This year was not too different, but there was one thing that made it more of an event than usual.
As you know Sweden’s Måns won last year which means the Eurovision was to be held here in Sweden, and in the Globe Arena. And if you’re not Swede you might not know this but Måns has been the host of alot of things on swedish TV (most noteably “Allsång på Skansen” for 3 years) so ofcourse he stepped up to the plate – and man did he deliver! He together with Petra was the best hosts of the Eurovision I have ever seen! Never before have I seen the show make so much fun of itself, its host, its contestants, hell even its audience as they did this time around! Major props to the script- and song-writers behind such hits as “Love, Love, Peace, Peace” which is trending YouTube now! The entire “Eurovision taxi” thing also showed the hosts don’t take themselves too seriously! And never before have I heard them make such a dirty joke like “grab your towels, it’s time to come together”, poking fun of their slogan “Come Together”. I absolutely loved it! You know the show is good when you feel that Justin Timberlakes guest appearence is the best time for the break for toilet and beer refill!
If you hate Eurovision for whatever reason, that’s totally up to you, but this year it was absolutely your loss!
Next year it’s off to the Ukraine. Which means it’s going to go down a few notches but now that we’ve done this new tradition for the third time it’s safe to say we can definitely keep it going.
The people that have spent enough time with me might have heard me say “what we need is a good pandemic”. That sounds very, very cold but the truth is for the Earth’s survival we do need one because overpopulation and the side effects of it are going to destroy Earth. Just look at “Cowspiracy”, episode 4 of “Blindspot” (“Bone May Rot”), all the times AI have decided that to protect humanity they must take over and cause havoc (“I, Robot” or the evolving story in “The 100”) or read Dan Brown’s “Inferno”. So something that is contagious like the flu, incubation period like the smallpox (10-14 days) and mortality rate of HIV (100%). Ebola isn’t close, it wasn’t contagious enough and had too short incubation period to ever spread big time. But unfortunately, going by how nature goes it’s only a matter of time until nature is able to combine that itself and bam, halv the population wiped out. Or the most humanitarian way would be for it to cause sterility, that’d solve it long term but nature isn’t very humanitarian.
It’s either that or start colonizing space! What’s more likely? But I sure as hell hope for the latter!
Anyway, I don’t know why, but movies/TV shows & stories about virus outbreaks have always intrigued me. I loved “Outbreak” although it feels kinda dated now. There’s a new game called “The Division” coming out next week which is based on the premise of someone releasing a virus through dollar bills on black friday in the US and the chaos that follows. (I loved the trailer where you can’t really see what’s happening but you hear how a mother is sitting by her sick child’s bed praying and crying … until she’s not). And I was fascinated to read up on the scenario they played out in the US pre-9/11 called “Dark Winter” based on the premise of Saddam/Al Qaeda releasing smallpox in 3 malls in 3 US cities. And Ron Howard is working on filing Brown’s “Inferno” coming out later this year.
Lots of stuff happening, so much I barely have time to update here. Alot of people’s birthdays, not to mention my own. I turn 40 in about 3 weeks, not gonna make a big deal out of it but going to Italy in September. Other than that it’s full throttle at work still and doing work on the house. And as always wishing I had more time for gaming, and my wife, and my son… just more time basically. 24h simply isn’t enough, even when I only sleep 6 hours…
But on the plus side, finally ordered the “Battlestar Galactica” Bluray pack that I’ve wanted to buy for a while. It was on sale, at €30 it was hard to say no. Because that show was awesome!
So how was that weekend you wonder?
To start off, meeting up with my trekking buddies for a beer and burger, great! Always a pleasure. Then came the movie… well I don’t know why I still bother going to the movies actually. First I had to pay extra for the 3d glasses! They should also have offered earplugs because the sound was way too loud. And not “I can hear this through concrete walls”-loud because that I can enjoy. This was loud as in sharp hurting my tinnitus-ear, so I spent half the movie covering an ear. And who needs an AC when you have a thousand people watching a movie when we can make them sweat?! Why do I bother!?
Afterwards I went home (which took longer than it should) and spent a few hours playing computer games until I was tired enough to fall asleep. And I thought I’d be enjoying lying in bed and just not do nothing without having a son yelling at me to get up. But I didn’t, got up at 8 again and watched some TV, movies, Formula 1 and whatnot and playing games, just like I planned. What wasn’t a part of the plan was a phone call telling me that an acquaintance passed away during the night. He’s a guy I met every month at our Star Trek gatherings, a really nice and all around righteous dude. So that pretty much ended that day on a downer. On Sunday it was back to the same stuff and the F1 race from Barcelona with another Ferrari win! And by now the family was back home so it was back to normal life again.
So yeah, it could’ve been better, definitely. But it was still pretty good!
I saw the movie “AFK” last weekend. I say movie although it tries to be a documentary. But 99% of the film is following the 3 people on trial for running the Pirate Bay and allowing them to talk freely without any opposition and very limited fact check.
But still .. some things in that entire thing is very disturbing. As is the latest twist Peter Sunde is blogging about. In short … if you’re up for digital copyright violation charges in Sweden you are in for a very very tough uphill battle. Not only is the prosecutor very “Hollywood”-friendly, so is the judge, the jury, the police and the court of appeals and as it turns out the European court as well. It’s pretty scary!
But what strikes me as the most upsetting thing in the entire story is that no one with judicial or political power is taking them seriously. There have been some serious integrity breaches and legal procedures never followed and bias that you’d think that some politician with real power would say “this entire thing was handled wrong!”. But no one is even listening to them. It’s like they hear “pirate bay” and just turn on ignore mode. Which is really sad and makes me embarrassed to be Swedish to be honest.
I can’t argue much for their innocence since they are guilty as shit of “assisting copyright violations”, but even so, a fair trial is the least they deserve.
And here we are, 3 years later and what has happened on that front? Well we have Netflix and HBO has just started in Scandinavia (albeit with very limited selection) but other than that we’re still pretty much screwed. If I wanna see a movie in HD the legal way I either have to go to the cinema, which is an entire project now that I have a kid. Or I can buy the bluray for $30 (which either involves taking a trip into Stockholm or order on te web and wait 3-4 days) and sit through commercials and advertisements and disclaimers and copyright warnings and a menu that takes forever to load because it connects to the internet and then I can finally press play. Compare that to the illegal way of “what movie do I wanna see? this one, ok, download, go make popcorn and poor up drinks, unpack, go to the bathroom, and the press play. They really should offer more legal ways of doing it because I’d pay for it! Valve realized a long long time ago that the best way to fight piracy is offering a convenient alternative and every game I’ve played for the past 8 years I’ve actually purchased.
Having a wife, house and a son is really time consuming. Gone are the days when I could just tuck myself in in my couch and have a “24” marathon. Or even watch TV shows – cause as things are now if one of us doesn’t like a TV show it’s hard to find the time to watch it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, just observing that nothing is perfect and even though I may look back at my 10 years of single-life in my rented apartment in Huddinge as a bit of waste of time it did have some upsides compared to my life today – I’d be lying if I said anything else. But it doesn’t mean I want that life back! But I digress …
One of the things I missed out on was watching shows like “Stargate SG-1”. Which, for a huge sci-fi nerd like myself, really was my loss. Ironically I watched “Stargate Atlantis” for a while and absolutely love “Stargate Universe”. But I’m slowly making up for it. About a year ago I bought myself an android tablet. And even though it’s already old technology-wise it still let’s me watch through that show a little bit at a time. Because I’m done sitting idly on the train for 30 minutes just waiting. So nowadays I’m watching “Stargate SG-1” instead, usually get through one episode per day, sometimes two when the trains are messing up. The only problem is it’s kinda hard to watch a sci-fi show, which has some darkness in it, when it’s daylight. I’m all the way into season 4 now and so far it’s good. Sometimes I hear an echo in my head going “Star Trek did it” but hey, you can’t run a show for 10 years without having some influence from the leading sci-fi franchise!
I dunno, not much is happening in my life to report on. I could go on about how I hate the world politicians for being too nice in regards to the current Isreal vs Palestine conflict but that get’s old very quickly, and me going on about it isn’t gonna do jack shit, babies and children are still being bombed and killed. It kinda makes everything else seem small in comparison.
But work is moving along nicely, still learning a lot every day. But I still hate computers – I’m trying to have HTPCs everywhere at home now that the online streaming is becoming a reality, it’s good to have a computer connected to the TVs and projector. But building HTPC’s and trying to make them efficient yet quiet enough is quite challenging, something I found out when watching the latest Batman movie which is almost 3 hours long which really heated that computer up! The latest F1 race from USA was almost ruined because I installed a new quiet CPU cooler on my HTPC that wouldn’t start after putting it back together again. So had to tear it down (my wife said it looked like it had been raped and pillaged) and eventually got it working and now it’s quiet, but still idling at 45 C which is way too much really.
Anyway, other than that, my son Sam is learning the language really really quickly now, every day he’s learning new things and putting words on feelings – “Wall-E is sad”!
I usually don’t miss much Star Trek related. Or movie related. So when a friend of mine said “have you preordered the Blueray of The Next Generation?” and I’m all ????. I had no idea this was even happening so gimme a minute to handle it. It was just too good to be true!
I don’t get what the deal is with “Game of Thrones”? Everyone is totally raving about it, and I’m at episode 8 and totally bored. The only thing I’m liking is the scenary, but that’s it. Ok maybe Sean Bean. But storywise it’s so completely un-original as you can get. I don’t know if it’s just me, but it really feels like we’ve seen most of the things on this show so many times before. Maybe not on TV because I have to admit it’s beautifully made for a TV show’s budget, but still…
Saw the last episodes of “Stargate Universe”. I kinda liked the first 2 “Stargate”-series but they were never ever even really close to striking a human cord or draw out any intense emotions. Because to be honest they were always making fun of themselves and it was hard to take it seriously.
But “Universe” was different. Even from the beginning it felt so much better and more human than the other ones. Less humor, more human. And episode 18 of season two, “Epilogue” was… well science fiction at it’s absolute best! I don’t know if it’s because of how my life has changed so much in the past years or what but I actually dropped a tear in the incredibly well written and directed sequence of TJ’s sickness progressing, that was intense.
I’m pretty pissed it got cancelled ofcourse. But hey, life goes on…
As expected Finland whooped our asses in the hockey world championship final. Although I still say it was a lot thanks to the refs! Their first goal was a direct result of a questionable penalty against Sweden. And right before their second goal the refs could easily have taken a penalty against Finland for the mowing down of a Swedish player behind the goal, but oh no. And right before their third goal Finland should definitely have gotten a penalty against them for putting his stick up in the swedes face. And the rest was just because the swedes stopped playing.
But I can’t say that Sweden played better than Finland so it was a fair cop I guess. And at least Canada didn’t win it!!
But it looks pretty promising for the future generation of hockey players in Sweden because most of the players were pretty young and we didn’t have many NHL pros with us, yet we still managed to end up second. But it’s only a sport 🙂
Ok I’m now the officially worst blogger since I haven’t written anything here in over 2 months now!
But after I’ve gotten back to work it’s all beeen pretty hectic in my life actually, both at home and at work. But I’m gonna have to chance that and make this a daily thing to get on here and make an update or two.
So what’s happening at work right now? Well I’m in the middle of upgrading our Adobe Connect from 7.5 to 8 which is not happening so looking at a fresh install instead, and that means having to do battle with SSLs again. And then we have SharePoint 2010 migration and on top of that we’re rolling out Windows 7 with new office and document management which is huge here.
At home my wonderful fiancé Helena is taking care of Sam and he’s just now begun kindergarten and so far it seems to be ok. Hopefully it’s not only because Helena is still there with him but we’ll see tomorrow when he has to deal with 5 hours there without her. Other than that it’s same old same old – trying to spend time with the love of my life while trying to get time to play some computer games, watching the latest episodes of House/Chuck/Big Bang Theory/SG:U and then there’s F1.
I am anything but bored 🙂
Yesterday I was flipping through our channels and actually stopped on National Geographic. They were showing a 2 hours documentary called “Six Degrees Could Change The World“. And it’s just what it sounds like – a documentary with scientists and sociologists going through what would happend if the earth got one, two, three, four, five or god forbid six degrees hotter. The conclusions were not pretty. At two degrees it’d start spiraling away beyond what we could control and at 6 it’d be game over. And when it was produced we were at 0.8. And at the same time all the world leaders can’t unite in Copenhagen (which in itself is a huge CO2 fest flying in all the people all over the world)! And this morning in Metro they said behind each kilo of ham on the dinner table at christmas is atleast 10 kilos of CO2.
If that doesn’t kill the christmas spirit I dunno what does!
Did you see the new “V” series that just got started in the states? I was a big fan of the original when I was a kid because “look at the lasers man!” but even later when I grew up and saw it on DVD and when I got it! I got the reference to nazi germany complete with jugend, the resistance and collaborators and everything. I totally loved it and understood what Kenneth Johnsson was trying to do. And I even saw how it was turned commercial and why he bailed out on the show when it got serialized.
– ANYWAY – he’s back for another attempt! It’s only been one 44 minute episode but so far I don’t like it. I like it as a sci-fi show, definitely, but it has lost the historical references and all of that stuff. Instead we are told (and skip this part if you don’t wanna know, but this is said in the first episode!) that the aliens have always been here and they are the ones to blame for the state of the planet. The idea is that the aliens come here incognito and ruin the planet so when the real spaceships come people see them as saviors because “it can’t get much worse”. Isn’t that a huge let down, blaming aliens for the state of the world today? I thought that was a bit too easy, especially for the americans that again refuse to go along with the eco-treaties with the rest of the western world!! I way prefered the historical references and reminders like that…
And so on saturday I sat down among fellow sci-fi geeks to enjoy a good send-off party the Battlestar Galactica. I hate watching the last episode of a series I enjoy but in this case I was completely ok with it!
I loved the show from the very first scene (cause I did particularly like 6 and the odd CGI space sequences) and it had some ups and downs and alot of “yeah, as if that could happen!” plots, and it did get a bit nutsy sometimes but I always liked watching it and watching how the characters grew and what they go through. Because the show wasn’t about bad robots, the science, the space battles, the CGI, it was about the characters. And I was totally ok how they left things for the characters. I was fine with not knowing really what she was and why she wasn’t dead, and with her dying and with everything. Considering most of the show was extremely dark it was a very bright ending. And the song “all along the watchtower” now has a special place in my heart 🙂
Nicely done Ron!
Yesterday I saw a movie that got me.. emotional. In many ways. It was called “Sharkwater” (IMDB link) and was a documentary about sharks, but not in the average way. It began by dismissing all myths about sharks being evil and human-eating killing machines and did a pretty good job of that. Then it went on about the food chain in the ocean and spent a large portion of the movie dealing with illegal shark fishing for the fins going to the asian market. It got me pretty damn pissed off seeing it. I’m not the most environmentally friendly person and even though I make a few contributions to Greenpeace but I’m not that into it. But I still got pissed at it. If we won’t stop simply for the humanitarian reason of dismembering sharks and throwing them back into the ocean then do it for the very environmental reason of them being so vital for the oxygen production in the oceans! Never knew this was such a big thing and I really don’t know if I should take everything in this movie at face value but it still got me going.
But it was all done with some incredible underwater footage that was just awesome!! Go see it!!
The more I date and the more I watch “House” the more I’m certain I’m totally gonna end up so totally like him! Bitter, sarcastic hopelessly single man running around commenting on human behaviour. Guess it could be worse 🙂
I either date women who are too good for me or women who… well, I think “I could do better” which is a bunch of shallow bullshit, I know, I can’t help it. And I know most women think the same thing when they look at my pictures. It’s the way it is, no matter how nice and polite some people wanna be. I know it’s shallow .. but I am honest above all. And on the other side are all these women I would really go well with that are either already taken or I just don’t wanna risk the friendship ’cause of my hormones
Meanwhile, having fun as hell. And won scrabble again 🙂
How’s 2008 going so far? For me it’s… well, still to be decided. On the downside we have
1) Warcraft guild breaking down again (which ironically would actually be good for me)
2) Alot of TV shows are starting their last seasons
3) Our trekking saturdays is probably gonna be a thing of the past due to low attendance.
So that should make me atleast a little bit depressed? Well, I ain’t. Cause today I woke up and witnessed a snowstorm outside and said to myself “it’ll be a miracle if the trains are on time today”…. but they were! So at 8 am I sat down in my warm comfy chair with a warm cup of tea and enjoyed the snowstorm in Kungsan. That felt good. Then I got a cute e-mail from a cute woman I’m hoping to get a date with any day now, but ironically enough she’s off to switzerland to ski over the weekend so that’ll have to wait. Which is why I can’t really say if 2008 is off to a good or bad start yet.
But tonight… Alien vs. Predator 2! Yeah, I’m actually going to the movies!!
After the past months of having busy weekends I had one with absolutely no plans what so ever. Not even buying groceries or leaving the apartment. Although I eventually did both. And bought myself a new exercise bike to break.
But most of all I steamrolled through a ton of episodes of “House”. I love that show. I love that character, have so much in common with that guy it’s scary. From the sarcastic humor at everyones expense to the bittery view of mankind as a whole, I totally love that character. And then I changed channel to TV4 Comedy and saw Hugh Laurie in the good old Black Adder episodes, what a laugh 🙂
And tomorrow it’s back to work again but I really did have a kick ass lazy weekend not doing shit.