Ehehe, he so scared

I've watched it sooooo many times now, but it's still fuuuuunny.

Thank you, Markiplier.

Oh no

I just realised something. My tattoo. My TARDIS tattoo. The sign on the front of the TARDIS is on the wrong door. A whole year I've had that tattoo and only now did I see it. I always see it in a mirror and it's right when mirrored! I didn't see it! Well, hell.
I can't be bovvered.

Dear 2015,

At the beginning of the year I made a promise to not make any promises for you, the upcoming year. No new year's resolutions that I could get anxious about or break. I'd say it worked out pretty well for me.

The blog passed 50 000 pageviews in 2015. To my great relief I moved, not once but twice. It was kind of coincidental (accidental?), yes, but it did land me with my own place in the end (and far more importantly; away from the Corridor which I was so desperately trying to escape).

At the end of April I took that trip to Old Blighty that I started planning at the end of last year together with a dear friend of mine. As if all of this didn't make it seem like I have all the money in the world I also got myself a new tattoo and finally finished my faun. Moreover, I seem to have bought and played a lot of awesome games during the course of the year. This pleases me to no end. I'm aware I might be more than a bit late but I've mostly played and very much enjoyed Witcher, Portal, Psychonauts, Skyrim, Magicka and The Wolf Among Us. Old goodies.

On a sadder note I lost a most beloved friend during the summer of 2015. My dear old Torsten went to his final rest, 19 years old, blind but still king of the farm. My grumpy little angel.

RIP Turbo Torsten

In August, I visited my 10th Medieval Week and kind of went all in to make sure and have done those things that I usually don't do when I'm there. A lot of sitting around, laughing and drinking the nights away in good company.
And then I finally got to see Dylan Moran. The man is inexplicably amazing.

In 2015 I've read a few books that really left a lasting impression; The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch was enchanting and I'm looking forward to reading the other books of the Gentlemen Bastards series. Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson is not what I usually take time to read but based on a friend's recommendation I had to give it a go and it turned out to be a total dream. I highly recommend it to everyone who appreciates the written word. Already, I'm planning a re-read some time in the spring. I wasn't as impressed with Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf as I was with his book I, Lucifer. Too predictable I felt though I absolutely love urban fantasy.
On a whim I also decided to read The Princess Bride by William Goldman and recommend everyone that love the movie as much as I do to do so as well.

I think I've made some new friends this year that I'd love to hang out with some more. I might have made a few new enemies - this is expected. I gave less of a fuck about other people's opinions. I did travel a bit.
There might have been less hugging than I would have liked but hey, I doubt there's an amount of hugging big enough for me.

I have plans for 2016 and a great deal of hope. I don't know a lot of things for sure but I will be seeing Dara O'Briain's show Crowd Tickler in May and yet again I'm planning a little adventure out of the country.

So, in conclusion:

Dear 2015,
we will never see each other ever again. And I'm fine with that.

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.