Vital information

If you get bitten by a wild animal or a dog while abroad you should get to a doctor asap and have a rabies vaccination program started. If you don't start treating rabies before the symptoms set in you're dead.

Fuck

Top Movies

I realized I never listed my favorite movies of all time (as far as I can remember). I made a list and ended up with 21 movies, which is a nice enough number, so I'm just gonna post them. It is very hard to order them, but the top 6 are clearly set apart from the rest.

Anyway, the bottom 16 are:
Finding Neverland
White Oleander
Casino Royale
Pan’s Labyrinth
Pay it forward
V for Vendetta
Kingdom of Heaven
Ocean’s Eleven
The Fast and the Furious
Lucky number Slevin
The Hangover
Cast Away
The Holiday
Saving Private Ryan
The Green Mile

And the top 6 are:
The Dark Knight
Sherlock – A scandal in Belgravia
(the top two are tied, and both had a mind-blowing effect on me when I first saw them)
The Avengers
The Lion King
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
The Shipping News

I view the BBC Sherlock episodes as TV movies.

Oldness

Age (henceforth referred to as Oldness) can be measured in years, but it can be hard to tie concepts like "old" and "young" to a certain number of years. I like to measure age in the ratio between the number of presents you receive on your birthday and the number of years you've lived.

Most people will start out with a ludicrous 15-20:1 ratio, which then drops sharply until it reaches a 1:1 ratio (usually somewhere between 10 and 20). After 20 there is a sharp drop in the number of presents received, leading to a high increase in Oldness. This seems to coincide with the age when the government has decided it is OK for you to enjoy a glass of wine at home, which is generally seen as a sign of Oldness.

At this point the presents will remain static, while the years lived will steadily increase. On your 30th birthday there will be a sharp increase in the number of presents received, accentuated by the sharp drop back to normal levels one year later.

By my calculations you should reach a presents to years ratio of 1:5 between 25 and 30. And that's when you're "old". You won't realize this until you're 31 though :P

Ps. My current ratio is 1:4 - still young, in other words :D Ds.

Sir Isaac Newton

In the words of the instructor in Mass Effect, Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!

Our defining moments

I saw a short collage on TV about the day when Nelson Mandela was released from prison and I got to thinking about the defining moments of history that we have experienced. Though technically we were alive both when Mandela was released, but it doesn't really count unless you were old enough to realize what was going on.

For me that timeline started with the millennium shift, followed by 9/11. Then there's the invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq. The tsunami in 2004, the earthquake on Haiti, Fukushima and Breivik. So what I'm wondering is; when does the good stuff happen?

My grandmother is old enough to remember World War II, and how much better everything got after it ended. She told me about the first time she ever saw a banana. Our teachers and parents like to talk about the Berlin wall, and what that day meant to them.

The Arab spring is the first good news that's happened in my lifetime, and it's still very uncertain whether anything good will come of it. But at least there's hope...

Legion

I never did this before, but I decided to bring my friend Legion to the Citadel. Legion is a Geth, so I expected some kind of reaction from the security, considering the Citadel was attacked and nearly destroyed by the Geth 2 years ago. You spent most of the first game fighting Geth that were attacking colonies all over the galaxy, and everyone agrees that the Geth are evil incarnate.

But nothing happens. And this is all in the core game, no DLC or anything. Considering you can do your quests in pretty much whatever order you like this is a bit strange. I was expecting a cut scene where C-Sec comes charging through the doors and I have to use all my hard earned reputation to convince them Legion is friendly. Logically the captain would tell me that however that may be, I should leave him on the ship, so as to not cause panic. If I by some miracle managed to talk him into letting Legion in, people should react to his presence wherever I went.

Even if I lied and told people that Legion is just an AI in a very realistic Geth-like chassis, people should be appalled by my poor judgement and tasteless humor...

An offer you can't refuse

I got a newsletter from EA. Didn't read it, but the subject was "Spela kostnadsfria demo för kommande titlar" Wow. FREE DEMOS!

Rusty Hearts

LFMAO at these character descriptions from within the game:

Frantz Kreuger:
A man with a past full of turmoil and suffering, his life turned for the worst when he became a vampire. Unabled to resist temptation, he bit one person and then sealed the blood inside his body in order to repress his vampiric urges. He no longer turns evil but continually suffers from chronic anemia.
After years of torture he has become a bitter and cranky man, but he has a good balance of physical skills and dark magic.

Angela Strraugend:
A young Witch Apprentice, she was sent from the Fog Forest to battle against Vlad. Before she left her village, she was forced to fuse her soul with Graestra, a sword possessed by an evil spirit, in order to gain special powers for the mission. Through this pact she is able to cast incredibly powerful magic spells, but the process turned her hair red and spiky. Still young, with spunk and attitude to spare, Angela may lack in strength but more than makes up for it with her devastating array of spells.

In the case of Frantz, the poor translation makes for hilarious results. This is the description from the game's homepage:

A gloomy man from the start, Frantz Kruger's life took a turn for the worse when he was bitten by a vampire.
Unable to resist the temptation, he bit just one person. Instead of letting the blood complete his transformation, Frantz used the blood and the force of his own will to halt the process. He now exists as a creature trapped in limbo between human and monstrosity. As a side-effect of his condition, he suffers from chronic anemia and insomnia, giving him an ashen appearance and a sullen, sarcastic disposition.

Pimp my Ride

This week Pimp my Ride visits the Vatican, to hitch up the Pope with a hot ride.

"Yo dawg, I heard you like praying, so I put a church in your car so you car pray while you drive!"

Unfortunately the Pope insisted on trying out the ride...

BREAKING NEWS: Pope dies in car crash in central Rome. Swiss guard is holding the Pimp my Ride crew hostage in the catacombs...

Dogs are awesome!

Just started watching a documentary on SVT Play called "Hur blev de tama?". Apparently there are about 35.000 wild dogs on the streets of Moscow. This in itself is hardly remarkable, what is is that they ride the subway. Dogs are not allowed on the trains, but these wild ones have become so popular that they are tolerated and free to come and go as they please. So they spend their days in the city center, eating people's leftovers and whatever they are given, and then they ride the subway to the suburbs where they spend the night.

They seem to have learned to navigate the subway system by smell, looks and the names of the stations. They are wild, but not at all aggressive to people - don't bite the hand that feeds you style. They've also formed packs, and reverted to more wolf-like behaviors in that sense. This has led scientists to think that it was the wolves themselves that took the first steps towards domestication, not humans.

Well, in any case: Dog's that use the subway network to expand their territories - how cool is that?

In Time

Cool concept, but they didn't really consider the consequences of having lifetime as a currency. Prime example: If a man is pointing a gun at you and saying "let me steal all your lifetime or I will shoot you" I'm PRETTY sure most people would try to grab the gun, since it's the exact equivalent of saying "let me kill you or I will shoot you"

DON'T STAND IN THE FIRE!

No, it's not supposed to be that much fire, but you know how it is with pick-up groups...

The Witcher 2, again

After having played through the game again (to check out the other main story path) on Hard difficulty and a Mage talent build, I am considering trying the last talent tree: Alchemy, on yet a higher difficulty (the first time I played on Normal as a Swordsman).

The problem is that the Alchemy tree seems more difficult to play in itself, but I might be wrong. And the difficulties available are:
Insane: Enemies deal more damage than on Hard, and the game deletes your saves upon death. You die, you start over.
Dark: The enemies are harder than Insane, but you can load earlier saves.

I have a feeling I will never be able to play through Dark difficulty as an alchemist. On the other hand I am certain I won't be able to on Insane.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

This was an awesome game, but the learning curve was a bit odd. In my opinion it went something like this: