Happy Holidays

Closing in on the end of 2015...

...and thank God for that.
Eighteen days left of this year to go and twelve of them will be spent at work, which is really why I'd like the year to be over ASAP. Working in a shop January and February are my favourite months as work goes because no one has any money left to spend after the Holidays.

Well, well, well Horowitz...

I have a cold and am feeling quite sorry for myself. Which is why I'm browsing through YouTube for some funny stuff. I wanted to share this one because I almost died:

(Laughing led to coughing and then I was coughing so hard I couldn't breathe. Dead.)

Little old hobbit

The Halloween party was amazeballs.

I'm going to work on this outfit some more.

Halloween

Dylan Moran is a fucking genius. And apparently he understands Swedes pretty well since most of his show was about death, the absurdity of modern society and being fat.

And I have purple/pink hair now. And I have just finished my Halloween outfit (about an hour ago). Yes. I know Halloween was two weeks ago but there's no better reason than Halloween to have a fancy dress party. And for some of us, every day is Halloween. Or at the very least, tomorrow (that would be Saturday) is Halloween. I'm looking forward to this soooo much. I'm planning on taking a lot of pictures.

Lets say it again; "Halloween".

More and more

It's been a terrible day for me but this breakdown has been a long time coming.

I've always been a bit of a lone wolf even though I love having company. In the past I've chosen to be by myself because I've been able to be alone without feeling lonely, it has helped me recover and stress down. But these days I tend to isolate myself more and more because I don't want to be a bother to other people; any and all people but people I know in particular. Being by myself has become a source of stress in itself and I feel more and more lonely. I don't want to force myself on people and consequently make them grow tired of me. It's entirely counterproductive because I know that I feel better when I'm spending time with people; no matter how little I feel like I contribute or how tedious or stupid I feel I'm being.
I'm absolute shit at keeping up with people and staying in touch and seeing people, you know, doing the things friends do to and with one another. I think about doing them all the time but then I end up not doing them after all. I often feel inadequate as a friend because of this.
I enjoy the little things from my friends; a text message, a phone call, a postcard, some sort of confirmation that I'm on their mind from time to time and I imagine that my friends enjoy the same things. It's not that I lack imagination. I have ideas for messages, letters, outings and adventures but there's a mighty big wall to climb between communicating them to the people I hold dear and where I am.

Maybe I'm being silly, maybe it's my cold (or lack of coffee) playing tricks on my brain.
I'm too busy to have this cold. I've got shit that need taking care of.
This has been my day off. I've done absolutely nothing.
Work is a mess.
My Halloween costume isn't finished yet.
But I am going to see Dylan Moran this Sunday.

So it's a Tuesday you say

Tapas and sangria on a Tuesday, fuck yeah. I'll have to be at work at 6:30 tomorrow.

It'll be glorious.

Oh, Dara...

Dara O'Briain will be taking his show to Sweden in May next year. I've got tickets.

There's two weeks left until I get to see Dylan Moran from the front row. A fucking dream coming true for me.

Yes. I like Irish comedians. There's just something about them. I mean, Dara is such a nerd and Dylan Moran is a genius.

Countdown to 27

Three days left until my birthday. My twenty-seventh. I have a wishlist the lenght of my leg but I really don't want to bother anyone with it, especially not my friends because they have about as much money as I do; which is very close to none at all.
I'm trying to have everything prepared for my birthday party this Saturday (the way I see it it's my duty to feed my friends) but I just know I'm going to forget something. Probably something obvious.
The real mystery is how I got this old and how time can move so fast.
And of course I've caught a cold.
Aaaand I'm having a bit of an age crisis.

"The fight is within me, and I’ve been to all kinds of different rooms in my life. So the fight that I have on a constant basis is just to try and better myself. I struggle like everybody else to try and be the best I can."

- Tom Hardy (and a big Happy Birthday to Tom, 38 years old today.)

Muggles all around

There are many kinds of muggles. Sometimes we need someone to remind us that their lives are not ours. Our lives are our own to live. We create our own lives. It doesn't have to be extraordinary to be valuable. We do this because we are invaluable. Precious.

Work? Nah...

Oh, I just love how I seem to be the only one at my workplace without a life. You know, hobbies in my spare time that I need to take into account. The only person who can offer to cover for collegues when they have better things to do. Or just can't muster up the energy to make an effort for the group.
I went to work at 6AM today and left work at 5PM. Because they needed me there when others chose to not be there for one reason or another. Because going to the gym is more important, right?

The Hutt (kind of) Recommends: The Rapture of the Nerds

The Rapture of the Nerds: A Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Situations by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross.

In our future post-Singularity society our main character Hew attends a party at a friend's house. It's odd, mostly because Hew is a miserable luddite of a Welshman among people who've embraced the technology brought to Earth by the uploaded consciousnesses now gathered in the Singularity (basically a huge cloud of a supercomputer encircling Earth). He wakes up in a bathtub with a vague memory of a great party and having met a wonderful leather-clad woman with a shaved head. After being violently threatened out of the house by his friend he returns home to find that he's been arbitrarily selected for jury duty to assess new technological advances to determine their possible usage for what remains of the human race.
Showing up for jury duty turns out to be the least of Hew's problems.

WARNING: some profanity ahead.
From the very first page my brain asked the question "what the fuck am I reading?" and I continued to ask that same question throughout the entirety of the novel. It's absurd, there's no other word for it, but in a very good way. Well, partly. Well, mostly. I really don't know. It's been weeks since I read the damned thing and I'm still not entirely sure.
It has a lot of references to other works of scifi, among them the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Star Wars, the Discworld series and Doctor Who so of course it intrigued me. But plenty of references to other people's good work shouldn't be the only memorable thing about a book. I remember liking our main characters Hew and Bonnie (the shaven-headed woman at the beginning of the novel) but the story itself failed to catch hold of me. Of course I turned the pages because I wanted to know what was going to happen next, but more to the point I wanted to know how and if the story could get even more absurd and how the hell one could finish a story like that.

I also remember having many short outbursts of rage over the fact that our authors seem to equate certain body parts with a certain gender. Throughout the book several characters use modern technology to change bodies; from one body with a pussy and boobs to one with a flat chest and a dick or the other way around, and even though we find out that the character in one of these cases clearly identifies as male but happens to have a body with a pussy at the time they still refer to him as 'she'. It might seem petty but it fucking irritates me. On the other hand, I'm a part of the 'feminazi mafia' so maybe I'm one of the few to react to that.

Overall, I liked the novel but also feel that it got lost in itself, got unnecessarily complicated and slowed down at some point in the last third of the book. It's worth reading the book just for the conversations between Hew and Bonnie though.
Bonnie is fucking awesome.

Morning mood

I bought a new coffee cup the other week. It goes very well with my morning mood.

The friendliest picnic you've ever seen

Nordegravar, Visby, 2015

This must be what I look forward to most every Medieval Week; the huge annual Wednesday picnic in wait for the annual fire show (TRiX at their best, not very medieval but awesome, seen by about 7000 people this year. I don't have the words to describe it so go watch the 2013 performance here.). This is when round about 3000-5000 people sit down and eat together. Drink together. Sing and laugh together. I'm not usually a lover of crowds but THIS, this is the kind of crowd I love.

To Wisby my medieval friends!

I'll be off to Visby in the morning for the Medieval Week on Gotland. It'll be my tenth time attending and I will have to be honest and admit that it'll probably be the last time in a long while. I think I've said it before (a few years ago when I skipped a Week because of reasons, mostly life-related) but this time it's for real. I will most definitely visit Medieval Festivals and Fairs, but I'm aching for something new and invigorating.
So if you happen to know of a really nice, quirky and/or charming Medieval Festival I'm open to suggestions for 2016. Anything themed 12th to 14th century would be amazeballs. Or I'll just gather as much information as possible about some festival in the UK and throw myself right in there. What could possibly go wrong?

The Hutt Recommends: Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

Johannes Cabal: the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard.

Oh Johannes, you despicable little thing, how I’ve come to love you.

Once upon a time Johannes Cabal, necromancer of some infamy, had reasons to sell his soul to none other than Satan himself in order to attain knowledge of necromancy. Years later he realised that he might need same said soul to deepen his research and consequently took a stroll right through the gates of Hell to pay Satan another little visit and renegotiate that deal they made a while back. Seeing as Satan enjoys a good joke on humanity once in a while, and knowing full well the futility in trying to get your soul back once you've given it up, he agrees to give Cabal a year in which to sign over a hundred willing souls to Hell with the help of a travelling carnival. If Cabal succeeds he'll get his soul back, if not he'll be damned for all eternity. With precious little time to waste Cabal raises a diverse crew of carnies from the dead and somehow persuades his own brother Horst to help him finish his task with bizarre results and many a twisted turn.

This is a steampunk adventure with a side of death, demons and wicked deceit.

Johannes Cabal: the Detective by Jonathan L. Howard.

The adventures of the necromancer of some infamy, Johannes Cabal , goes forever on!

By some mishap Cabal finds himself abroad and entirely in trouble after some not wholly legal activities including a book that wasn't his but should have been if his plan had only worked. Now, he's awaiting execution and to no enjoyment at all. Unexpectedly, he's offered a chance for escape and takes on the identity of a government official to escape aboard a luxurious aeroship on its way across the border and away from trouble. Or so Cabal thought. Instead Cabal finds himself trapped on an aeroship where passengers disappear mysteriously and an attempt is made on him own life.

Johannes Cabal: the Fear Institute by Jonathan L. Howard. 

Johannes Cabal, necromancer of some infamy, takes on the Dreamlands! Ghouls! Witches! Zebras!

One day Cabal is introduced to the opportunity to take on a strange task indeed. Employed by the mysterious Fear Institute he is to lead an expedition of a handpicked few into the Dreamlands; a land beyond the veil of sleep that is entirely formed by dreams and dreamers. In these Dreamlands he is to find and destroy the dreaded Phobic Animus which is supposedly the very embodiment of fear and the source of all terrors. Will the group find the Phobic Animus and is it possible to wipe out fear entirely? But the real question is about something completely else because what does a man like Cabal, who's unafraid of death, really fear?

The third part of the story about the sarcastic necromancer Cabal takes a very Lovecraftian turn and kept me enthralled until the very last page. I read most of it in a day and could hardly put the book down once I had started reading. The only thing I could have wished for is the inclusion of more non-male characters because as much as I love Johannes, it would be nice to see a non-male character of importance once in a while.
Big plus for unexpected ending!


Howard's fourth book about Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by the title The Brothers Cabal came out in late 2014 but has yet to show up in Swedish bookshops.
But you can find it on Amazon. *hint hint*

It's... pink

If someone had come up to me a few years ago and told me that I would decorate my home in pink and all manners of different vibrant bright colours I would have laughed in their face and called them an idiot. But look at me now.

• My kitchen is white with details in different shades of blue, green and red.
• My bedroom is green with details in white, gold and silver.
• My living room is white with details in black, white, metal and neon pink.

It looks amazeballs.

This has been another quite irrelevant post.

Stay hydrated my friends.

The Hutt Recommends: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Many years ago I read a novel by the title Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. I found the first chapters hard to get through because of the unsympathetic nature of one of the main characters, one Mr Norrell. After having put down the book for several weeks I finally found patience enough to continue the story. And I loved it. All thanks to Jonathan Strange and all that happened after the petty Mr Norrell finally took residence in London following the disbandment of The York Society of Magicians.

The story takes place in 19th century England during the Napoleonic Wars but with the added assumption that magic is real but haven't been in use by human kind for hundreds of years. We follow the two men Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange and the relationship between the two as they turn to their quest to return magic to England, each with their own goals. And consequences. An arrogant hoarder vs a naive yet seeking mind.

The reason to why I'm writing about this is that the BBC production of the novel is very close to the source material and has therefore been a true delight to watch. Rarely do I get to enjoy an adaption so close in both narrative and feeling to the original text.

Please enjoy either of them, both if you can and wish.

I has a big happy

I have the tickets. I will see Dylan Moran's Off the Hook in November.

Until then, enjoy this gem and click on to more awesomeness.

My Home

My new apartment is starting to look like I want it to. You can tell how I've planned it. The big things are all there (my mum bought me a really good kitchen folding table) so now for the decorations; photos and pictures and things.

Games, games, games

So the Summer Sale on Steam is here. So far six new games have mysteriously dropped into my inventory (incl. Portal 2, Magicka and Bioshock). Weird how they just appeared... Bah, whatever. They were really cheap (all under 5€) and are going to be a great way to waste time when the weather turns awful again.
For now though, it's all sunny outside and I'm preparing for the Midsummer festivities this coming weekend by adding some colour to the mop on my head I call hair.

Twist and SHOUT!

This is going to one of those boring posts where I just vent for an unreasonable length of text. Just a warning. You can now proceed if you wish.

I'm at a place in my life where I'm twisting and turning everything around me in order to try and reevaluate which of these things are worth spending my time on and which I need to drop. There are so many things moving around my mind and general existence that are making me confused and uncomfortable that a good old cleanup might be of good use. To be honest, it's been put on hold for way too long.
Of course not all things are negative; I finally have my own place. It's still a feeling I'm getting used to and I am still fighting to furnish this new home of mine, preferably without completely murdering my bank account in the process. But I've no spare money to spend on anything else. For the love of the Gods, I'm still in love with the thought of having my own refridgerator so not having the money to fill it up with all kinds of food is rather... anticlimactic. Having a place of my own means I can stop postpone the rest of my life because I don't have an HQ where I can collect energy and recuperate.

My hair is growing longer as planned and right now it's some sort of popsicle green colour. It's good. But I'm running out of hair dye and am uncertain whether I should stay green or go back to trusty brown.

I've lost over 20lb since last summer but have no idea how I've done it. Despite being aware of having lost weight I haven't realised yet that I've gotten smaller so I've had to spend some time with my sewing machine and most of the clothes I bought during my London vacation but were too lazy to try on before buying (because "I know my size" and hate looking at myself in changing room mirrors). Add to that a whole bunch of old clothes I just can't imagine getting rid of simply because they're too big for me. I've actually had to dig out clothes I wore in high school. It's all a bit surreal. But modifying clothes inspired me and now I'm itching to dive into remodelling my medieval dresses. You know, the dresses I haven't moved from storage yet...

But I also need a kitchen table. So much of my life circles around food, being a hobbit and all, I'm embarrassed of not even own a table to serve it on. For myself. My future as a crazy old cat lady (sans cats for now) is starting to look imminent.

Underneith the blanket all is well

I have a sort of "art" page on DeviantArt.
I say "art" page (with quotation marks added) because it's mostly fan-fics from way back when I was a hormonal Potterhead teenager as opposed to the feminist Potterhead adult I've become of late. Aside from that there are some pictures of my early outfits for the Medieval Week. I don't update very often these days because... reasons. Most of them ridiculous. I happen to be a bit of a perfectionist, and also I'm an insecure person and compare my work to other's to the point when I'll just give up on creativity altogether and go sit in a corner with a blanket over my head.
In the last month my pageviews on said "art" page has gone up about 140% and although I should be excited I'm essentially just embarrassed. All there is in my gallery is badly written fan fiction that I'm itching to rewrite and poorly sewn dresses in cheap materials. How am I supposed to be proud of that? I have a few new dresses lying around I should take pictures of, so why don't I? Well, that's because I want them to be part of an outfit - a completed outfit. I should be happy that more people find my page but frankly, I'm panicking. I'd like to think that I've improved since I submitted my first material in 2009; my first dress in 2011; and my first fan-fic in 2012 but as of today I don't feel I have proof of that. I'm putting unnecessary pressure on myself and I know it. I just can't help myself.
I'll go hide under a blanket now.

Kipple

"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more."
J.R. Isadore - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (by Philip K.Dick)

The question every single person ask themselves when they're moving and packing/unpacking their belongings is often "WHERE DOES IT ALL COME FROM?". Well... Isadore seems to have a theory.
Yes, I'm reading "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". At the beginning of the book I could tell why I thought the film adaption (Blade Runner) was so depressing and not at all what I want from a film but the book is actually growing on me. Keep in mind though, that I say that after nine chapters which would be about half the book. We'll see what I say after reading the whole thing.

Those tattoos

I have a few of them now. To the right is the newest contribution to my collection of skin doodles. It just had to be done. The police box and a rose simply because Eckleston and Tennant were my Doctors. About seven hours under the needles in total.

And the faun is finally all done (picture below) but she's a real bitch to snap a good picture of! Somewhere between ten and eleven hours to complete.

I'm guessing that my next project will have to be a sperm whale and a pot of petunias down on my left shin where you'll find a fan of cards with 42 written on them.

It's either the whale+flowers or a Tolkien-themed back piece. I don't know. I don't have the money for it right now.

What I do have is a flat to furnish.

Dear Old Fictional Friends

There are certain things that you should have done together with a friend that has put up with you and your weirdness for the last thirteen years. To celebrate ten years of firendship we travelled to New York City together in 2012 but despite both of us being huge Potterheads we've never been to London together. We felt it was time to rectify that.

Highgate Cemetery
One of my wishes for the trip was to go to Highgate Cemetery. Partly because the Cemetery itself is beautiful in its own overgrown way and I can be silly among the ivy and headstones (see photo to the left) but also because some of The Greats have been buried here since its opening in 1839.
Highgate Cemetery has two parts; East and West. We visited the East Cemetery, which you can do for free, but the West Cemetery is accessible by guided tours. It's more elaborate with catacombs, mausoleums, vaults and bigger monuments. Also, the West section was used in filming Dorian Gray (2009). We didn't go there. We found out there were some large, rare spiders nesting in the West Cemetery.

One of The Greats I spoke of before being in particular one Douglas Adams in my not-so-humble opinion. Adams is without hesitation my all time favourite author. He wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the books about Dirk Gently, Starship Titanic and some classic Doctor Who.
Forever loved and forever remembered.

Nerds, Adams is the reason You should always know where Your Towel is.
Join in on Towel Day on the 25th of May, because a Towel is just about the most useful thing an intergalactic hitchhiker can carry with them.

Everything is Harry Potter.
Our main purpose for this trip was to go to Warner Bros Studio Tours - The Making of Harry Potter in Leavesden. We've been talking about it since they built it years ago and we were definitely not feeling twenty-seven by the time we arrived at the studio. These books have been with us since we were twelve years old. We grew into adults with them. I, for one, cried tears of joy when I stepped onto Platform 9 3/4 and saw the Hogwarts Express.

We love the books but are not great fans of the movies. I'd say they did a good job with most of the story but nothing will ever be as amazing as one's own imagination. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until my dying days.

We walked through the creative process from books to movies, hitched a ride with the Knight Bus, drank butterbeer (YUCK, by the way, yuck) and had a blast.

We certainly bought souvenirs to bring back home. I'm drinking coffee out of mine as I write.

I love being a nerd. It offers me a perfectly good excuse to act like a total weirdo when faced with things like scale models of fictional castles.

What else?
Being nerds meant that we simply had to go to certain places. But then we are also more than nerds so there were more things to do while in dear old Londinium.
We went to pubs because I like beer. We had some great food and some less than great food because we both love eating. I bought shoes of course (just one pair). We went to Ogre's Nest for board games and Forbidden Planet (twice) because awesomeness. We went to Oxford Street to find Disney Store but they didn't have much to offer us older children. We took a stroll through Kensington Park (and had a real party when we met a friendly and playful puppy). We went to Camden Town and saw the same shirts being peddled by a hundred different people at a hundred different prices.
As it turned out we found most of the things Harry Potter at other locations than The Making of Harry Potter though; PJ's at Primark, shirts in Camden and a passport holder at Forbidden Planet.

Trevor
It was a good vacation. The only thing that put a hamper on our good moods was that the cleaning staff at our hotel left a lot to be desired. We named the dead cockroach lying on the stairs Trevor. We felt brave to be eating the hotel breakfast every morning.

Cheers!

I'm Home!

I have now moved in to my new flat and set up the things that are most important to me; the kitchen is fully operational, the bed is made and my computer has internet access (oh, Spotify and Netflix how I've missed you in the last few weeks!). Everything else is sort of... sorely lacking. Since I've always lived in furnished rooms I own no actual furniture. I even had to buy my own bed now that I got my own place! Furniture's the next step to be taken I guess. (Now that both of my tattoos are done and completed whatever money's left will be spent on redecorating my new home. Mine! My own... my preciouuusssss...)
Also, I'm just home from Dear Old Blighty and it was superb. So I'll be telling you about that as soon as I've decided what pictures I'd like to share. Until then, enjoy this gem.

"Ain't no party like a Communist party."

Here, have everything. Now.

See, here's where I get a little cross. 'Put out' you could call it. Not angry, because I have no reason to be angry (because awesome stuff is going down). But irritated. A common theme in my life is that first nothing happens, then nothing happens some more and then ALL OF THE THINGS(!) happen all at once.
Now is one of those times.
And I'm a bit put out because I got shit to deal with and a very short amount of time to do it in.
My life's in boxes.
Easier to move that way, right?

Double standards

I can't wear my septum piercing visible at work, or rather, I refuse to because of the comments I've recieved when I do. I have a variety of collegues with different very distinct appearances. Among them I have two male collegues who stand out from the rest; one has a huge, well-groomed beard and tattoos covering most of his right arm and the other has a snakebite piercing. There are occasional comments on the tattoos, some admiration for the beard and (surprisingly) next to no comments at all about the snakebite piercing. My green hair on the other hand... countless, every day, every hour (99.99% positive). When I wore my septum jewellery our customers would look less at my face, they would make weird discreetly offensive jokes, ask why I would do that to myself, talk about how hideous facial piercings are and so on ad nauseum (I even noticed how som customers would choose to decline my help in favour of one of my collegues or choose another checkout than mine if they could).
So naturally, I found myself asking why that was and then it hit me; I'm a woman. I am still seen as public property. It's seen as completely acceptable to comment on my looks at any time (hint: it's not). I also work in a shop. Which only works to exacerbate the situation. I'm supposed to be this comely and appeasing creature and while the green hair can be considered cute and quirky, the septum piercing is still considered improper to most. Put them together and all I am is a rebellious, untoward girl who've lost her way and need to be told so.

Sorting things out

So I'm in the middle of moving.
Yeah. It's official. I'm actually moving out.
At the beginning of next month I'm off from the Corridor and on to the Collective. 

I'm sorting my life into labelled boxes and I'm not entirely certain what these boxes say about me. Most of them just say "Books" right now. Little by little the room I've spent the last 2,5 years of my life in is emptying. Hopefully, I'll like things a lot better at the Collective. You know, with people I've made an active choice to live with and weren't just stuck with.
Yaaay, go me!

50 000

So, it would seem I passed 50 000 pageviews (since July 2010) last night.
Congratulations to me and many thank-you's to you.

The Great Book Sale

In Sweden we have a huge annual book sale every end of February in which all bookshops participate. It was and still remains a sort of sales trick, a stunt as to temporarily up people's interest in buying books. To encourage reading too, yeah sure, but mainly to get people to buy books.
I LOVE IT.
I'm a book nerd above all other ways of being a nerd and as a book nerd I look forward to that time of year. Every year's the same. This past autumn I reached a point where I bought too many books to suit my somewhat shaky economy. So I promised myself I wouldn't buy any books before The Book Sale, a promise I kept and now here I am with ten new books to cram into my already overflowing bookshelves. Not all of them were on sale but seeing as I was already set to buy books I made sure to also buy a few recommended pieces.
Again, I need to promise myself not to buy any books for a while.
Next year perhaps.

"I've got a new tattoo" etc and so on...

A tattoo of the Doctor's TARDIS on the thigh? How mainsteam can you get, right? Oh well. After five hours it looks gorgeous. Next time we'll get some blue, white and slime green (yes, it's really called "slime green") in there. And it's going to be pretty as all hell when it's done.

Well, this feels weird

I kind of feel like I just did a dine and dash at the tattoo studio. I'm used to paying up front after each sitting but this time they'll send me an invoice. So here I am. And I'm having this strange feeling of guilt. Hence: dine and dash. Tattoo and dash.
Next sitting: April.

Wanna go on an adventure?

I have been spending the last half hour ugly crying watching production videos from the making of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Hobbit movies. Everything from the Hobbiton location sets me off.
(I need to have a LotR marathon pretty soon. C'mon nerds, join me.)
Running the risk of sounding massively ungrateful for the vacation to Dear Old Blighty I'm planning I've just realised that my dream vacation is Matamata, New Zeeland. If I ever went there though I'd spend the whole time crying and laughing and crying some more. I was twelve when I read the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I was thirteen when the first film hit theatres. The original Trilogy introduced me to fantasy for real and has shaped my nerdiness in many ways since. Back then I wanted to be like Arwen (a starting point for my impossible struggle for that ethereal femininity elves possess and many following body issues I think) but the older I get the more I identify with hobbits. They appreciate the important stuff: good company, good food, good ale, good earth, good stories.
And they're content.
So screw elves, I'm a hobbit through and through. And I want to go to Hobbiton.

The Gamer Hutt?

This past October I had a sudden, but forceful, urge to play something other than Diablo 3 for a while and bought The Witcher, Spore and The Orange Box (Halo, Halo 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2).
On a whim.
As you do.
(They were on sale.)

I finished The Witcher pretty soon and though I was intrigued by the story the game itself is kind of... drawn-out to the point of excruciatingly boring. I found myself wanting to skip through most of it (all combat, most quests etc etc) to read more about characters and get further with the story. Just talk to NPC's about other NPC's more vital to Geralt's own story. (My interest is skewed by the fact that I've seen the Polish TV show Wiedzmin and I LOVED IT SO MUCH. 10/10 would recommend. Well, maybe 9/10 and the fact that it's on a very tight budget is evident in... everything.)
The end fight in The Witcher game was utterly and completely anticlimactic for me.
I was not a happy camper.

Understandably, I was hesitant to try anything else for a while as I was hungover from my Witcher experience. I went back to Diablo 3. And it's still boring as all hell unless you're in multiplayer mode. Yesterday I finally installed Spore. Played a little. It's totally brainless but in a fun, time-wasting way.
Today I installed The Orange Box. And tried Portal. The cake might be a lie but the hype sure wasn't.
I've never really called myself a gamer, but maybe it's high time to add an other nerdy title to my name.
Speaking of games; I've bought Carcassonne + an expansion (Bridges, Castles and Bazars). It's the best.

Happy S.A.D. 2015

I really loathe Valentine's Day. I loathe it with every single bone in my body - all 206 of them in fact. Even when I wasn't single I held no greater love for this commercial stunt meant to sell you even more shit you don't need to prove your supposed love for other human beings.

It puts unwanted pressure on everyone.

• Single people feel useless because they're not in a romantic relationship which is apparently something you should strive to be in order to be complete as a human being.
• People in relationships feel useless because they can never be romantic enough to fulfill some sort of unattainable picture of romance sold to you by media whose single goal is for you to consume and feel incomplete (rinse and repeat).

And lets not even mention money and alcohol. Because nothing says 'I love you' like alcoholic beverages, right? To get in the right mood, eh?! *cringe*

Shit like flowers, chocolate and cuddly toys are expensive, especially over Valentine's. So what are you supposed to do when you're short on money? I have so many questions. (Like, who'd actually want a bouquet of flowers? Flowers wither and die within days and I wouldn't want them to represent my love. Can I just have breakfast in bed instead? Not just on Valentine's but a little now and then? I love food. Food tastes good and gives energy, a much better representation of what love should be. I tend to feed my friends, loved ones and guests to prove how much I like them.)

It would seem I just can't wrap my head around Valentine's Day. I don't see why Valentine's would have to be different from any other day in a romantic relationship - love is something that should be ever present, should it not? And don't say that I can't understand it simply because I'm single (because that's only part true!).

• If you need alcohol to be romantic with your partner/s - get new partner/s.
• If you need your partner/s to buy you expensive shit for a fake holiday - seems like high time get your relationship goals checked.

But hey, don't mind me. I'm just a regular old cynic.

Balls of steel

I'm a bit of a klutz. I lose things all the time and in the past month I've lost three threaded balls for my piercing jewellery. Just poof, gone. This is exactly the kind of event I'd call a SMEF - Severe Mass Existence Failure. Left socks does this a lot. And pencils. And bobby pins. They just go missing into thin air.

This resulted in me getting myself a small bag-full of new 3 mm steel balls (rather than the standard 4mm) and I've got to say it looks better, even though I might be the only person who'd notice it. They might also go missing much faster but that is yet to be seen. Anyway.

Bonus! Story time! I've worked at the same shop for some 2½ years now and people are just starting to recognise me out of my uniform (the green hair really made it easier). One of our regulars saw me at the local grocery store this fall and since I wasn't at work I was wearing my septum jewellery. Ever since then he's mentioned my septum piercing every single time he's been at the shop. "I'm so relieved that you're not wearing that nose thing" or "How's the nose" or "Those nose things are just hideous". And every time I just try to avoid the subject or explain that I only wear my jewellery when I'm not at work. But he keeps mentioning it and it got me wondering what he really expects me to say? "Oh yes sir, you're right! I'll go take it out right now if it pleases you, sir!" Ugh. I just want to tell him to get the fuck out of what I do to my body in my spare time and what kind of jewellery I wear does not concern him in the least (since how I look does not in any way affect my work skills, which should be the only thing that matters). His opinions on my looks are genuinly unwanted and really sexist - like I'd give a shit about his assessment of how fuckable I am. Now I'm all worked up about this.

The Hutt (kind of) recommends: Reviver

Reviver by Seth Patrick.

Don't get the title wrong here, I really liked this book. I appreciated the characters, and the story (though sometimes on the slow side) captured my interest. To be honest, it had me nervously looking over my shoulder for strange apparitions after the first chapter.
But there was one thing that really stuck with me: the crying.

Forensic reviver Jonah Miller cries all the time. Because he's sad about losing his mother. Sad about people leaving him. Sad about being alone. Sad about the fact that doing the only thing he ever felt good at, reviving, is bringing him nothing but heartache (and as it happens, headache). Thus he acts like a normal human being; he drinks a bit of alcohol, hugs his cat and lets the tears run wild. Why will this stick with me? Because I rarely get to read about it (or see it in movies). There's a widespread societal norm saying that men don't cry and personally I hate it. Tears might be hinted at (it pissed me right the fuck off in The Blade Itself - did he cry OR WAS IT THE RAIN ALL ALONG, WE WILL NEVER KNOW) or they might have the less stereotypically 'manly' character break down (see Rocky Raccoon in Guardian of the Galaxy, guiding word is 'raccoon' here) but to have these emotions dealt with in a natural way is rare. And it just struck me how sad it is that I react to it so strongly and find it refreshing.

Lets get on with the book itself:
Reviving is about bringing back the essence of a recently deceased person for a short period of time and talking to them for a score of different reasons; for the idea of closure for close family, to catch a murderer or whatever other reason there may be. Only a few people can do this and even fewer do it well. Jonah is one of those people. So when the author that introduced reviving and its vast possibilities to the world is murdered, Jonah sees his opportunity to give back to the person that gave him his career. What he doesn't expect is the impact of the information said author discloses.

On the other hand I'll have to admit that by the middle of the book you can see exactly where things are going and why. It's a classic tale where noone can claim innocence. The book's neither amazing nor groundbreaking but it's good.
And then there's the crying.

The Hutt recommends: Chicks Dig Comics

THIS.

"Chicks Dig Comics - a Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them"
edited by Lynne M.Thomas, Sigrid Ellis

In these times of GamerGate, the Fake Geek Girl meme, and everything else the male dominated nerd community can come up with to scare women out of even trying to get into comic books and other nerdiness, this was a rather uplifting read. A group of nerdy women that really MADE IT in the comic book and graphic novel business share their stories of growing up to become nerds. Their stories point in the direction that becoming a nerd seem to be getting easier but diversity and representation remain a HUGE issue within the comic book world, or rather, the lack of it is rather distressing. Representation is one of the issues often mentioned throughout the book and the comic books the writers grew up with are problematised and brought forth as something that used to be but need to change apace with the changing audience.

A good read.

On a related subject - look what I've got in the mail! Look at the pretty! It's available for free online but I really want to support this artist on so many levels. The art is breathtaking, the characters lovable. and the story is altogether engaging.

"Sunstone" by Stjepan Sejic

What I've just finished:

Or rather:

Slightly upset.

"The Blade Itself" by Joe Abercrombie

HOLY COW BATMAN. A grand collection of highly interesting characters but none of them female (two women in total through the book given any sort of attention, one could have been substituted by a lamp and the other... well, she's not been along for long enough yet to make much of a mark) but aside from that a very good story. Had me glued to the pages. I'll get back to you when I've finished the whole trilogy as The Blade Itself is only the first part.

Happy New 2015

My first post of the year will begin with a huge WHOOP of joy because I'm recieving my very own copy of the first issue of Sunstone by Stjepan Sejic some time next week. Aaaand I might have pre-ordered the second issue.

Also, fuck 2014.
I had a few good things happening to me but that's on a purely individual level. Sweden has during 2014 become one snake's nest of normalisation of racism and fascism on a state level. Some 13% of the voters in last year's election found it to be a good idea to put the Swedish Democrats in a position of power - these are the fuckers who more or less publically condone violence against Muslims and leftist activists.
2014 also saw more than a little police brutality against peaceful demonstrations.

The few good things about last year was flying off to Mallorca and getting a bit of the old sun and alcohol, dying my hair green, and working on my tattoo. I met some awesome people I'd like to see more of. I finally realised how much I like being on vacation. How much I love the political side of LGBTQ pride festivals.
I finished Stephen King's Dark Tower series and loved the everloving fuck out of it. Neil Gaiman is awesome, and despite his occasional misogyny Robert A. Heinlein has really caught my interest.

I don't want 2015 to be worse than 2014. That's it. I'll try and work on that. I didn't make any resolutions for 2014 and just as well I didn't. I will not do that for 2015 either.
I might keep working on my nerdiness.
I might want more hugging out of 2015.
I might also have started planning a little trip to Dear Old Blighty. Lets start there.