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Never forgetting the storms

26 Mar

There are some childhood memories that I’ve thought about quite a bit recently – vivid memories of the storms at the family summer house. I remember that the worst of the storms almost always seemed to keep away from the island we lived on, hammering the lake but sparing us as if there was some hidden barrier protecting our home.

I enjoyed sitting on my own down by the rocks at the shore, watching the lightning over the lake. It poured down, but the rainwear kept me dry and allowed me to just sit there and take it all in. It was powerful and majestic. The warm rain against my face, the wind blowing the treetops, the roaring sea beneath my feet. The air was alive with a million water drops making the sea boil. Lightning cut lines between a grey sky and the horizon, and thunder danced between the islands. It was exciting, but at the same time calming.

I was alone on that rock, but nature itself opened up and embraced me. It was all around me, and it said “This is what I am. I touch everything, and I am the touched. I am the raging sea and the beating heart. And you are part of me.”

That was many years ago. If it would rain right now I doubt I’d even notice it. Living in a city is much like being immersed in a cocoon. Protected. Sanitized. Air conditioned. Planned. Life here is homogeneous.

Each and every one of us have the wonderful opportunity of being alive and sentient, and we get to experience this on a fantastic planet. It’s got sunshine and pitch black nights, heat and cold, breezes and storms, rain and hail. Trees reaching for the skies and mountains large as gods. And yet we choose to live in cities filled with asphalt and malls and traffic lights and 7-11s.

Don’t get me wrong – I love the city and everything it promises. But the cityscape has been my horizon for many years, and I think I’m getting ready to face the elements again.

 
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Send your money to Tim Schafer!

09 Mar

It took me long enough, but now I’ve finally donated to Double Fine’s new adventure game through Kickstarter. Sure, the very successful crowd funding of this project will likely change things in the games industry, but what I’m the most excited by is the prospect of a new adventure game by Tim Schafer! I started my path as a PC gamer with adventure games, and the best ones usually had Tim Schafer as a designer and writer, so I’m just thrilled that he and Ron Gilbert is making a new one after all these years.

Day of the Tentacle. Grim Fandango. Wonderful and funny games, and some of my favorite gaming experiences of all time. They had so much character, so much wit.

Come on – it’s still possible to donate for a few more days, and each dollar they get is a dollar closer to the budget of Grim Fandango!

 
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Posted in Games

 

The stuff you missed

08 Mar

It happens all the time. Something new and cool is released, but you have no idea. Or you simply ignore the whooshing sound it makes as it passes by just slightly outside your area of interest. By definition it’s impossible to know how many cool things you miss out on, but for me there’s probably a great deal.

And sometimes that’s just great, because you can find or rediscover it on a rainy weekend day and realize that it’s pretty damn good. Having lost that new-car smell, any exaggerated expectations have left your body like that tiresome cold you no longer remember.

Last weekend was a weekend like that, rediscovering both a game and a movie. I bought Stacking from Double Fine (oh, and don’t forget to donate to their Kickstarter page), and my girlfriend brought the movie Lars and the Real Girl. Strangely enough they share a theme I didn’t realize until just now as I write this post. They’re both about dolls.

I’m a handful of hours into Stacking, and it’s been a nice experience so far. The art direction is full of charm and is perfectly married to the gameplay. It’s a puzzle game, where each puzzle is solved by the unique abilities of the matryoshka dolls you control. Yes, you play as traditional Russian wooden dolls, and just like a real matryoshka you can stack the smaller dolls in the bigger ones. You often walk around with 5-6 dolls, each encapsulated by the next.

The challenge is finding what doll can solve the problem at hand, and occasionally it requires you to be the right size. Sometimes you must be tiny, controlling only the original little doll on his quest to save his family, and sometimes you need to be huge, pushing around someone enormous like the female opera singer. And yes, the fat lady sings, and when she does her high pitched voice shatters all nearby glass. The different abilities of the dolls (and each only has one) are not always there for gameplay purposes. Quite often they’re just funny, quirky or part of revealing the doll’s character.

The biggest criticism I can give Stacking is that the presentation of the puzzles quickly becomes formulaic. The game would have gained a lot from greater variation in how the player progresses between areas and challenges.

Next to my desk I have a Star Wars matryoshka doll, bought in Moscow during my time at Funcom. Funcom’s geek culture had a certain love for stuff like that.

Lars and the Real Girl was a movie I had barely heard the name of. I had fairly low expectations as we hit play, but I was pleasantly surprised as a sweet drama unfolded. Despite a bizarre premise it never felt forced. Lars, a lonely man with a social phobia so intense he doesn’t function around women, completely loses the plot and gets a Real Doll as his girlfriend. His issues run so deep that he manages to convince himself it’s a real woman, and builds his life around their relationship. Solid writing and good acting (Ryan Gosling as Lars) makes it believable.

Lars deep commitment and very real love to the doll suggests that perhaps love is not something that happens between two people – perhaps love is always one-way streets that sometimes happen to lead to the same place. Maybe we’re just projecting love unto others, hoping that they will project back in return. Maybe every man is an island, but an island with a lighthouse. I’m sure that’s not the message the director intended, but it’s not an idea I find distressing despite its bleakness.

Oh well. Not bad for a dull weekend.

 
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Posted in Games, Movies

 

Through the noise #6

13 Feb

My gold digging equipment is left behind in some diamond filled crevice. Putting my ears to the tracks, I hear a tap dancing hobo from miles away. He’s tapping morse code, spelling out hypertext transfer protocol adresses. Beep for beeep, I write them down. This is the real treasure. 

Todd Howard’s DICE keynote
Todd Howard, the creative director of Skyrim, gives an interesting and revealing talk about how Bethesda creates their games. Definately worth your time if you’re into game development.

Top five regrets of the dying
Well,we’re all going to die. Here are the top five regrets expressed by the dying, according to someone that used to work in palliative care. Let’s not make this list ours when the time comes, OK?

The end of evil?
The word “evil” is deeply problematic, expressing nothing but ignorance of the real processes and desires that drive people. Whenever someone with power speaks of evil, reach for your gun! He’s either lying or he’s a fool. This article discusses why neuroscientists claim there is no such thing as evil, and I wish that idea could claim some ground in the public debate.

Gelaskins
If you’re ever looking for protection for your smartphone, tablet or laptop, check out Gelaskins. They make durable skins that look amazing. I bought The Great Wave (Katsushika Hokusai) for my netbook and iPad Touch a long time ago, and now I’m considering getting it for my HTC Desire Z.

 
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Posted in Lost & Found

 

51 words for snow

07 Feb

The eskimos are said to have fifty different words for snow. It’s not remotely true of course, but so goes the modern legend that we love to retell. I guess it’s a romanticization of the relationship to a natural phenomenon (and of the idea of indigenous people in tune with nature), probably saying less about eskimos and more about the people repeating the saying. We want to be closer to nature.

I think it’s often true that the modern human, with her apartment complexes and information feeds, secretly longs after the woods, mountains and rivers she has organized away. She desires a deeper sense of snow.

Perhaps those of us up here in the northern part of the world ought to have a slimmer version of the same myth, with our long winters. Thirty words for snow? Twenty? I probably have no more than a handful, but I sure know snow.

Truth to be told, I am sick of winter. See, we Swedes have a short summer. Spring comes late, and autumn always seem to arrive too early. Then we face many months of snow, cold and darkness. We count the day as blessed whenever our pale skin gets some sunshine, and we huddle in our brightly lit homes to keep the cold and the dark away. This winter I started longing for spring already in october.

Funny, then, that I enjoy the winterous landscapes of Skyrim so much.

Perhaps it is the contrast between sitting comfortably in a warm and bright apartment while exploring a steep mountain in an intense snow storm. Perhaps it is all the mysteries awaiting the curious who chooses to leave the beaten path. Or maybe it is the diversity of environments – the many variations on the theme “snow”.

Most of Skyrim is clad in snow, and yet it never ceases to surprise you. Moving from area to area, you encounter one unique snow landscape after another. The intense snow storm that seems to drown the world in white, the strong cold wind that blows newly-fallen snow from nearby ridges, the green grove that receives the year’s first snow, the…

Even as a swede, I have no words for many of the types of snow Bethesda has captured. That is not a reflection on my vocabulary but a celebration of Bethesda’s world design. If the saying about the eskimos had not been false, it’s easy to believe that even they would run out of words. I don’t know what strange country Skyrim’s art director comes from, but wherever that might be his people must speak a language with 51 words for snow.

It’s not only the variation. Each type of snow filled environment has been carefully crafted, giving you a rare sense of climate and weather. It genuinely surprised me how cold I felt when I climbed the game’s first mountain. Not only do the areas immerse you, but they evoke specific feelings. You will feel cold, but also melancholic, hopeful, filled with awe and so on. Couple the strong artistic vision of each landscape with the variation of environments and you experience an ever-changing emotional state as you walk the land.

With my dislike of winter, I would not have expected Skyrim’s defining feature – the one that made me fall in love with the game – to be snow.

 
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Playing Skyrim

10 Jan

The move to Sweden was an ordeal. It should have been fairly easy – Norway is a neighbouring country, and I am Swedish after all (although with 50% Finnish sisu). But the completely insane housing market in Sweden (good luck trying to find an apartment without renting one from someone already renting it or paying a bribe of half a year’s salary), and the fact that we were defrauded gave us more than one headache.

Yes – defrauded. We we’re royally screwed on an apartment by a sociopath. It’s long story that I might tell another time, but for now I’ll just conclude that the parasite is doing time.

Anyway. Games.

The ordeal meant that most of our stuff waited for us in a warehouse, in the twilight zone between the previous apartment and the next one, and we had to wait until early December until we got it back. That translates to a lot of time without my PC or my Xbox 360. My already intimidating games backlog continued to grow and grow.

But it’s been well over a month since my hardware returned, so the backlog should surely have been reduced by now. Right?

Well, Skyrim happened. It’s not like I don’t want to finish Deux Ex: Human Revolution, it’s not like I don’t want to try out Battlefield 3, but…

I was never that impressed by Oblivion. And Skyrim is not a perfect game. But by god was it a long time since a game captured my imagination like this. When I’ve played it, I keep thinking about it even when I should be sound asleep. I think about the things I might want to try, and potential scenarios that might unfold the next time I enter its captivating world.

The game lives in the mind, and it was years since that happened to me. I remember having games stay with me during downtime when I was a kid, but these days it’s very rare… and I treasure whenever it happens.

 
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Posted in Games, Thoughts and life

 

Once there was a Hitch

20 Dec

The Hitch is gone. Christopher Hitchens – author, journalist, debater, atheist hero – has died from his esophageal cancer at the age of 62.

A relatively short life, but Hitch lived (at least to an outsider like me) a full and productive one. His death came as I was in the process of reading his book God is Not Great, with his autobiography Hitch 22 waiting next in line. Someone said that the man wrote more than most people read in their life time, and that is probably true.

Still, 62 years. That’s exactly double my age. When I’m that age, I hope to still have aspirations and dreams, and the energy and time to realize them. There is little doubt Hitchens still had the energy, but he ran out of time.

I’d like to think that death belongs to the grey and frail. That death is the territory of those who’ve not known their own fire for years, of those who stumble on their thoughts and memories. We expect the end of our lives to be a foggy marsh it takes long to wander into, each passing year taking us further into the mist where we ultimately succumb to the treacherous morass.

No. Death belongs to those who die, no matter how young or spirited.

Here are two videos with clips of Hitchens speaking, displaying his razor sharp wit in debates, speeches and interviews. I am saddened that there will be no more of this.

 
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Credits

11 Oct

…and as the movie ends and the closing credits appear, the names scrolling by are less real to you than the characters in the film. Like the rest of the audience, they are avatars. Non-player characters. Vague backdrops to the dreams, visions and hopes that populate your aching head.

 
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Why I love the troll

07 Oct

Last weekend I posted the following on Facebook:

“Tonights “Troll i Eske”: Drive. Masterful direction, great photography, subtle acting and gripping story. All resulting in a very suspenseful and emotionally powerful movie. Go see it!”

Oh yeah, it was a good movie alright. If you don’t feel inclined to take my word for it, know that Roger Ebert liked it too. But hang on. “Troll i eske”? Well, it’s Norwegian for Troll in a box. OK. But who is the troll, and why is she hiding in a box?

Troll i eske is simply the greatest thing cinema in Oslo has to offer, and if you happen to live there, have any interest in movies at all but have never met the troll – know that you are missing out!

This is how it works. Every now and then there is a Troll i eske-showing at Cinemateket. You don’t know which film they’ll show, what genre it belongs to, or where it comes from. All you know is that it’ll be a high quality movie that hasn’t premiered yet. You buy the ticket, and until the moment the projector starts, the troll is still hiding in her box.  And I love it.

So what’s so bloody great about it?

The excitement

Going to a cinema is still something special, no matter how expensive your equipment is back home. It’s different from lying down in your sofa, popping in a dvd and fast forwarding through the trailers. It’s a bit like going to a show or a play. You are part of an audience, all waiting to experience something larger than life. And when you don’t know what you are about to experience – only that it’s going to be great – then the ritual gets exciting.

The organizers at Cinemateket have yet to disappoint in their selection, so at this point I simply trust that Troll in eske is a guarantee for a quality movie.

The unexpected

My last few visits have given me a relationship drama, a silly comedy and a dramatic thriller.

Two of those I wouldn’t have gone to see at the cinema if it had not been for Troll i eske, and it’s quite likely I would never have gotten to see them at all. There are genres that normally don’t do a very good job at attracting my attention, which is too bad because there are of course many excellent films to be found in most genres.

Thanks to the troll, I get to see great movies that I otherwise would have missed.

The snobbery

You get to tell people that you have already seen that hot new movie, even before it has had its premiere. You’re so great you get to see movies well before mere mortals get the chance. You are first with the latest and greatest in the world of cinema.

The purity

Take the movie Drive as an example. Whatever you do, don’t head over to Youtube to watch the trailer. It gives away far too many key scenes, plot points and spoils much of the character progression.

Before the movie began, having just sat down in the comfy seats at Cinemateket, I had no idea the movie even existed. I am completly convinced that I had a much richer movie experience not knowing all I would have known about characters and events had I seen the trailer.

Not knowing what movie you will see means you probably haven’t checked it out online beforehand. Going to see a movie that haven’t had its premiere yet hopefully means you haven’t been bombarded with trailers. It all helps in having a pure, untainted cinema experience.

The respect

People who talk. People who text. People who chew their candy and sip their drinks far too loudly. People who get up and stand in the way of the screen like lemmings as soon as the credits start rolling.

The Troll i eske audience is not completely void of these people, but there are far fewer of them than in the average multiplex crowd. A common quality of Cinemateket-goers is that they respect the cinema as an institution. Ultimately, that results in a more pleasent movie experience.

Got your attention? Here’s the link to Cinemateket. Become a member (cheaper tickets), have fun and give my regards to the troll. I look forward to meeting her again!

 
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Posted in Movies

 

The Steve Jobs post

06 Oct

Steve Jobs and the Apple
Steve Jobs showed us that with enough intelligence and talent, vision beats all committees. That work should be a passion, and that you should have faith in the path you walk. Thank you, Steve.

 
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