24.01.2012 :
i'm about to rage-quit facebook. the final straw is the tag removal process, which now requires four clicks
and all kinds of bullshit options. um, let me illustrate..
first of all you have to find the remove tag link, which took me an extra ten seconds than normal since
apparently clicking "remove" wont work anymore, which is instead some arse to do with the photo appearing on my profile page
(yeah sorry, i don't read all garbage, i shouldn't need to). the "remove tag" link
is 'hidden' further down the page (it's below the fold on my browser), and instead
of removing the tag and having done with, it brings up this ridiculous window:
the options are not sufficient - i need a "mu". why should i have to say whether this is a picture of me or not?
i don't want to give facebook more information about the photo, i want to remove all information.
if i don't want to confirm it (yes it is actually a picture of me), i have to claim it's something against
facebook's terms and conditions. lie, basically.
i am a reluctant and passive user of facebook. i'd rather it didn't exist, but since it appears to be the
only means by which i can communicate with certain people (and several of my bands have message boards on facebook)
i'm 'forced' to have a profile. i absolutely don't want any information about me on facebook.
nothing at all. so tagging me in photos is a prime way to piss me off, especially now.
the easiest solution is probably to just unfriend/ban/whatever the people who keep doing it,
but nothing about facebook's interface and policies is simple anymore. i stopped trying to keep track of
their labyrinthine ways years ago. the whole thing is a fucking joke. perhaps i should just keep clicking
the "hate speech" option, that seems like the fairest thing to do.
and so in conclusion, perhaps i will just delete the whole thing. in as complete a way i have the ability to.
wait, wasn't anonymous going to do that on november 5th last year? oh nevermind
we just lost the racoon to the toilet.
21.01.2012 :
"these are the good old days" i keep telling people. but no one understands what i'm trying to say.
maybe it's a bad sentence. nouns and adjectives need reconsidering. a substantial verb is required.
fucked, if i know.
run-on blog posts. like i will ever finish anything at this rate. i wrote about four words every night between
20:00 and the time my brain shuts off. it doesn't help that i don't have anything to say. apart from the three
long posts that actual have a point/theme and have been sitting half written for weeks now.
anyway. watching small creatures learn is just incredible. marika just grabbed the frog and pulled it, all by herself.
after weeks of training. ribbit ribbit ribbit. except now she's just pulling it in rage.
i guess i'm training her a bit like a dog. with a bit of encouraging i can get her to grab my fingers
when i hold them out above her and say "grab". when i then say "up" she pulls herself up into a sitting position.
for about a week i'd been doing all the pulling, but now she anticipates it and pulls herself up with her own arms.
i'm not pulling her up at all anymore, it's all her own work. it's brilliant. and it probably makes no difference
what i'm actually saying to her, but it's fun anyway.
her best trick is falling asleep at 7pm precisely every evening. she's like clockwork. but for just one hour a day.
she's also being trained to put the sut/dummy into her mouth by grabbing it when i dangle it infront of her face.
she's getting there, slowly but surely. also in the pipeline is 'thumbs up'.
"we have come to a point in history where we are losing both photographic recording mediums and iconic photographers",
excellently put .
"let's open up this pit!"
11.01.2012 :
i am a bucket of sleeploss. a mouthful of knives.
raindrops making metallic symphonies against the roofing.
rhythms as old as the weather itself.
the music of the spheres is chaos.
four in the morning and my mouth is 32 springs clamped tight in a vice.
the tension goes from the back of the neck up to the top of the skull,
then all the way down to the base of the spine.
i'm waiting for that feeling when the water finally runs from your ear -
the warm wet pop of resolution as the bubble of dullness suddenly clears
and you can hear again.
my new favourite sport is racing against other parents' barnevogn in the courtyard - our child will sleep out longer than yours!
all of a sudden i'm totally entertained by baby videos. it may be tacky of me.
but either way, you can't deny the cuteness of this
girl being asked who her favourite is .
that's what the internet was designed for (not cats ).
and nicolas cage put it best when he said "oh no not the bees! not the bees!" -
30 japanese hornets kill a whole bunch of honey bees ,
in brutal bullet time. probably the actual best video i've seen in months, or longer.
this is what happen when seperately evolved emergent behaviours collide.
or when evolved behaviour meets something unnatural, like wolves slaughtering sheep flocks.
or old people wandering around supermarkeys, how grilly put it.
also this collection of
movie
poster trends is great.
why did no one tell me
rastamouse was a real thing?
01.01.2012 :
new years morning is for kid a, because seemingly being the only person in the world without a hangover
never made the streets look so lonely. everyone's garbage, drained champagne bottles and firework carcasses,
all lying in puddles in the road. and another danish tradition - rain on new years day.
it's grey and dulled like you forgot days could be.
but i felt inspired and thought i'd do my own "best of 2011", except i couldn't find a starting point.
did i see any films worth talking about? finish any good books?
did i listen to much new music? did i see many gigs?
(actually i think i played more gigs than i attended, if that's at all mutually exclusive).
i could probably list my favourite youtube videos of the year, but i'd like to give the start of
2012 a little bit more respect than that. especially since it'll be our last.
don't take the end of the world so literally. thing of it more like the death card in tarot.
anyway, i guess i've had more important things going on.
and if my guitar playing can lull my daughter to sleep my life is somewhat complete.
now i have a sudden urge to watch the neverending story. or read it.
22.12.2011 :
there's something cosy about cycling to work in the dark. like cycling the inside of a pearl buried deep below the ocean.
the silence of a beast not quite yet waking. and everyone in the street is there with a purpose, even it's a rubbish
one like trying to earn a living. and it's completely unlike cycling back home in the dark again - eight hours later
and you've missed the seven hours of sunlight. it's still pretty out across the harbour, the sunset gradients and the
moon still hovering out there somewhere (does it even dip below the horizon during decemeber? amongst other stupid questions),
but it's a sad and tired beauty.
i guess what i'm most reminded of is the dual societies from chuck palahniuk's rant
(proof that writing a few uninteresting and repetative books does not mean you've "lost it", not quite yet).
some more random stuff to fill up your christmas holidays with, if you even got any this year:
if you haven't seen it yet, the
girl complaining about pink princesses and other coloured superheroes
is one of my new favourite videos. much better viewing than the masturbating dog. she will be president one day. i hope.
i've travelled many times with crimethinc books , they're very good for reading
on the move (in terms of structure and content), and that simply carrying a book or other political materials can get you
stopped
from boarding a plane is somewhat terrifying. but hey, we all hate ryanair anyway, as if that was the point at all.
(too much) content from the chaos communication conference ,
unfortunately probably all essential viewing/listening.
it's a shame the heath ledger photo is a fake though.
finally, it would have been somewhat of an honour to receive just an honourable mention in
Chris TT's top 10 list ,
but top of his best played gig list? that's just some magical shit right there.
(the trick is to give your guests the whiskey bottle and let them get on with it.)
did i really just say "in a proto-hipster kind of way"?
22.12.2011 :
this lack of sleep throws me a kind of sadness that only the silversun pickups can simultaneously understand and remedy.
like a tangible thing that needs playing with. something that needs dragging into the sunlight and skimming through the air.
and it's just fine.
this girl protects me like armour. transcendental and irrational.
looking at photographs of myself at her age, for the first time i can see the younger version of
me as a different and solid entity. my memories have become third person.
i was a boy i could have touched and talked to, if only time wasn't quite so cruel. and it breaks my fucking heart.
"inside of me and such a part of you", etc.
but look at how happy i was. this crazy child. so much joy and sadness all mixed up,
and of course none of it could makes any damn sense. how could it when you can't pin reason onto a single thing.
i may have come across differently, but i was never a child who thought he had it all figured out.
this rambling all stems for a project i started a few weeks ago, some misguided attempt at
recording all of my earliest memories. this is something i'll write about at great lengths another time,
when it's finished, which will probably be never. so nevermind.
18.12.2011 :
the office christmas dinner is something i always both look forward to and dread just a little.
getting plastered at the expense of your employer is always good, but having them there at
the same time? it's not that i lose astute-ness, if that's a word, it's just that i stop caring so much.
unless that's the same thing. apparently i needed telling "dude, don't talk about that here "
quite a lot. but no worries.
so that's my yearly schnapps quota filled - glasses topped up before they're even finished.
all in the name of physically punishing your employees in the only legal way. and
i had it especially tough, since the food was as traditionally danish as you can get. my main course
was rye bread with butter and raw onion. and i'm not even joking. a few days earlier my boss
had enquired about the vegetarian options for me and the restaurant had replied with
"maybe there will be some cheese", but that only came out with the dessert.
it's my own fault, i should have followed through on my threat to go out for pizza.
there was also a pre-dinner surprise activity. isn't the thought of that just enough to make you
feel a little sick? especially if it involves guns .
at first i was extremely unimpressed. don't get me wrong, i'm not a pacifist,
i just don't really like the idea of me shooting guns. but there's nothing worse than a kill-joy
at the christmas party, so i just grumbled about us not being allowed to drink alcohol yet
(after a painful five hour meeting some of us were in serious need to get drunk) and got on with it.
it turns out all that time playing point blank in the birmingham student
union building didn't just get me my name at the top of the scoreboard for all time, it made me a mean shot in real life too:
or at least i am when i've got a rest for the rifle barrel. nevermind. in the wild we have trees to lean against.
14.12.2011 :
listening to the crackle of the rain over the baby monitor. little baby noises. dum dum diddy.
a constant humm from somewhere up in the roofing, a drill or saw, lost in the wind and static.
"spiritual distress should last at least ten minutes at a time."
this paragraph (from the
wiki ) says so much about rugby:
"The first, named Chiming Clock, was originally designed to chime and play music on the hour
and half-hour as a tortoise and hare raced around the dials, reenacting Aesop's fable.
The clock has since suffered issues in timing the sequence, now occurring almost randomly.
The second companion clock, following a train theme to symbolise Rugby's famous railway,
was installed on the opposite side of the shopping centre,
but was soon dismantled and scrapped to make way for shop extensions."
also, why does rugby shopping centre have it's own wiki page?
i'm missing the days when i actually had stuff to write/blog about.
13.12.2011 :
i've been saving up all year (since last new years, when i bought myself a bottle of brewdog's paradox smokehead
and a bottle of mikkeller's beer geek brunch weasel) for the black tokyo horizon. i couldn't resist the collaboration that
includes my two favourite knobby pretentious breweries. i'm somewhat scared to drink it. the question is,
who wants to join me and what can you bring to the table? (insert evil smiling emoticon of your choice right here).
i actually have an insane amount of beer stockpiled. what with the influx of all the christmas beers
(i hate to say it but brewdog's is by far the best so far, especially for the price, although i haven't
touched the norrebro bryghus or mikkeller beers yet) and a few too many trips down to
fish n beer . i got my smokey stouts and i don't want to waste them
on a non-special evening. (but laurence, every evening is special.)
i'm also on a bit of an autumn/winter root vegetable roll. first i magicked up an amazing parsnip, butternut squash and
pumpkin gratin/crumble. yesterday it was creamey mash and homemade mega-burgers, with the cheapest bakedbeans danish
money can buy. tonight we'll be having roasted potatos, jordskokker,
parsnips, butternut squash and pumpkin (again). a cascading dinner menu.
it seems like ages since i've really been into making food - you forget how brilliant it is when you're
busy working it nine to five (or eight to four, in my case).
12.12.2011 :
no more cubes for me. not this year at least. with the acquisition of a latch cube and a dayan bermuda earth cube,
which is unnerving to look at, i now feel complete. so who wants to join me for a cube party? my max
capacity is 40 (unless you bring you own cube), and then only if someone doesn't mind being assigned the dreadful barbie cube
(kenneth perhaps?). sign up quickly!
i now have cubes by all the big names in cubing that you've probably never heard of (lanlan, witeden, dayan, mefferts, etc),
but the coolest cube i've played with recently is the one i bought anne and jens's as a moving-in present
(because every respectable household needs a rubik's cube) - a hungarian cube made in the original rubik's cube factory.
it's not that it turns particularly smoothly, or has perfect colours and durable stickers, but it just feels right .
it makes me miss playing with my old original cube (currently part of the cube-mobile).
um, on a more serious note though - don't touch my cubes .
photos coming not soon enough..
10.12.2011 :
i almost forgot to mention that the regulars played in helsingor the other day (a thursday, just to be awkward),
probably because i didn't have much to say about it. safety dance, that's about all you need to know.
but it seemed to go well enough. in some strange way i miss the punk venues, trash strewn around everywhere,
so many empty beer bottles and graffiti'd walls, a huge mac sitting ready for anybody to use in the band room.
any venue that pays in ale no.16 is good by me.
you can dance if you want to, etc. it was the best song i've played on stage since sesame street,
but it's not exactly the best song for a set opener. apparently we didn't care, but my hand did. there's no way you can be
warm for that amount of disco octaves. but anyway. punk and all that.
the marika update: she's really beginning to discover her hands now, mostly through the act of trying to eat them.
the cleverest thing is how she's learnt to put her right hand infront of her mouth. this serves two purposes, if
a sut/dummy is in her mouth then she holds it in, if there isn't one in her mouth then she can suck her hand.
she'll be moving on to rubik's cubes soon.