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.