I never really got into the whole RSS thing, I’ve always preferred to visit the author’s page and read the text in its intended design, and to sort of get a feeling for the differences between blogs, aestethically speaking. Firefox’ and Opera’s feed managers leaves something to be desired, which didn’t really help the cause any further either. I’ve known about dedicated feed readers, both programs and web applications, but I never got interested enough to ever check it out. Using Opera, it has been easy to check up on blogs manually so to speak, as I keep a folder with my blog bookmarks, which I then use the “open all folder items” option on to open all the various blogs in individual tabs. That solution has worked perfectly fine for me so far.

Today, for some reason, my view on RSS changed. I believe it was the single simple mention of Google Reader in a blog that triggered it, though I’m not sure why it was anything special this time. Either way, I went to check it out and put all my feeds in Google Reader, and I pretty much instantly deleted all my bookmarks, and I’m now using Google Reader exclusively to keep up with blogs. I must admit it is a rather lovely way to go on about it, it makes everything so easy to keep track of. If you read more blogs than is good for you, you should definitely check out Google Reader, much love.

I decided to check out Dexter some weeks ago, and so far it seems quite entertaining, but I’m still not completely sold. Unfortunately my Dexter viewing was cut short by the recent release of the Nip/Tuck season 4 DVD rips, which were quickly consumed. Season 4 was wonderfully entertaining, like the previous ones has been as well.

No idea why, but this week I purchased two domains, elastomania.us and elastomania.ws. Will see what I’ll do about those. I was thinking of creating some sort of skintatious/kopasite page where people can host their levels and have the whole automatic updating thing going on, but I don’t know if I’ll have the energy to create such a thing.

On Tuesday I had to help my mom and uncle with staining a house in Jessheim, where my uncle lives. Absolutely horrid work, but it felt sort of good to do something physical, even if it left me sore for days. Using a paint brush up and down with my mouse arm didn’t exactly work out too well. We only got one of the sides done, along with cleaning and scrubbing the three other sides, so the plan is to go back tomorrow and stain some more. I really really hope it rains tonight so it gets postponed.

Also, bought some more books!

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
  by Lewis Carrol
• The Great Gatsby
  by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Beowulf
• Stardust
  by Neil Gaiman
• Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
  by Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett
• It
  by Stephen King
• Don Quixote
  by Miguel De Cervantes

Been feeling down like crazy these last weeks, for no apparent reason. Just one of those usual emo periods one has every now and then I guess. Not getting a good night’s sleep, feeling tired and drained of energy. So I’m doing The Closer marathons. Never watched it before, but I downloaded all the seasons a couple of days ago and have been enjoying going through them so far, only one season left.

Our shower is still not functioning and it’s incredibly annoying. Yay for having 20 year old shower setups.

The last few days has been spent doing the occasional 2-3hr hiking trip — it’s great to live in a city where you can take the subway for 15mins to find yourself surrounded by complete wilderness. I think I must have been inspired from watching Man vs. Wild, a newly discovered show for me. If you haven’t seen it, it’s basically a documentary series about this badass guy named Bear Grylls, who puts himself in the middle of nowhere all over the world with no provisions, and he then shows you how to survive and get to civilization so you can be rescued.

I’ve also started re-watching Star Trek: The Original Series, I had completely forgotten how good it was (though The Next Generation is my favorite). I had also forgotten how incredibly campy it actually is — not a bad thing.

Epp pasted a picture in #across of a celebrity a couple of days ago and asked if anyone knew who it was. I vaguely remembered her from somewhere, and after a while I remembered she looked an awful lot like Buffy’s little sister, and indeed it was. Which again reminded me that I never really watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer properly before, I’ve only seen an occasional episode or two from the TV when it’s been on in the background. So I decided to give it a try since I’m bored out of my mind these days, and it’s been fun to watch so far.

When I haven’t been hiking or watching series, I’ve most likely been playing old console games through emulators. I just downloaded complete sets of all games for Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and Genesis, together with a nice program to launch the games from, called QuickPlay. It’s been a lot of fun now that I have a controller to play with, I’ve always had to use a keyboard before. The games that’s seen the most action so far has been Banjo Kazooie, Super Mario 64 and Paper Mario for the N64, along with Metroid Fusion and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for Gameboy Advance. Fun fun fun.

Started watching Traveler yesterday, quite alright first impression. Feels a bit too much like Prison Break (without the prison), not sure if it’s a good thing or not. I tend to get disinterested when the protagonists keep getting into more and more trouble, and the plot evolves into some crazy conspiracy thing that ends up with the government being behind everything and blah blah, you know the deal. Anyway, watched the current 5 episodes, and still interested enough to keep watching, will see how it develops.

Downloaded Need for Speed: Underground 2, which I didn’t have time to try before. Quite enjoyable. Also tried the newest in the NFS series, Need for Speed: Carbon. Somewhat enjoyable as well. I loved NFS Most Wanted, and it seems Carbon is a sort of mix between that and Underground 2, the only problem is that it’s sort of missing the most fun parts of both of them. In other words, it could have been a lot better if they had combined the best of both worlds.

Tried Tomb Raider: Anniversary as well, which was quite entertaining. Felt a bit more like the classic Tomb Raider instead of all these new crap versions in the series.

Been listening to these songs quite a lot lately, mix of old and new:
Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
Snoop Dogg ft. The Doors - Riders on the Storm
Teuvo Loman - Kari
Hazza’ah Al Minhali - Naamat 3yoonik (?, no idea if right name)
Sting & The Police - Some “Best of” Album
Jay-Z - The Blueprint (album)
Journey - Don’t Stop Believin’ \o

Over and out!

Guess it’s about time I write something, though I’m sorry to disappoint with this boring entry. Life is pretty eventless and boring at the moment — I should be doing something, but I’m such a procrastinator. Whatever, just enjoying doing nothing I suppose. Lost my movie mood the last few months, guess all those 2-movies-a-day weeks finally got to me. Kept myself busy with watching new series instead, and giving old ones another chance.

I never liked The Office, but I made a deal with Zerox to give it another chance if he gave Death Note a try. I ended up liking it this time, and as such I also tried out the US version of The Office, and fell in love with it. Though I recognize the “better” and more subtle humour in the UK version, it doesn’t really do it for me like the US version does.

This is months ago, but I also gave Arrested Development another go, after hating it from watching a random episode on TV a few years back. I’m glad I did, because it quickly became one of my all-time favorites. Easily one of the best comedy show in existence.

Few days ago I also gave Curb Your Enthusiasm another chance after it had the same fate as Arrested Development from random TV watching, but I also ended up liking it. Not loving it, but perhaps I will after watching more.

Some weeks ago I started downloading all the episodes of Deadliest Catch, which is just super awesome. It’s a documentary series about crab fishing in Alaska. And yes, it’s way more interesting than it may sound.

A few weeks ago before that, I tried out Nip/Tuck, which I now also love. Most awesome show.

Before that, The Shield, another spectacular show.

So yea, boring entry, sorry. By the way, I really hate using paragraphs with only like a sentence in it, but it would just look weird to bunch all those series infos together into one, so sue me. Maybe I’ll write something more interesting in the near future, but don’t count on it.

Dear Akagi,
It was fun while it lasted, and I’ll miss you, even if you disappointed me with your last episode. We had a lot of fun together. May you descend into darkness peacefully, you truly were a legend.

Yasegaman bakaride
mou hantoshi sugitaga
naniga kawattaka
darewo aishitaka
atama no naka de ima
yume ga kuzuredashita
nantokanare

What I’m currently watching, or have watched these last months.

• House
  I think I already mentioned this, but it’s worth mentioning again anyway. This show is the fucking best. I downloaded the first two seasons and watched them both during one single weekend, and now currently keeping up with the third season. Hugh Laurie is the shit.
• Weeds
  Thanks to jsim for recommending this gem, another show where I downloaded two seasons and watched them all in a few days. Now I’m just waiting for a third season to start, whenever that might be.
• Battlestar Galactica
  As I said before some weeks ago, I started watching this, and it took me well over a season before I really got into it. The mini-series was so-so, the first season was an improvement, but it wasn’t until halfway in the second season that I really started enjoying this. Unfortunately I kind of lost the mood again in the end of the season and in season 3 which is currently airing, when the story took a turn for the worse in my opinion. Hopefully it will pick up again, at least I’m still downloading the episodes, but I think I’ll wait a while before I bother watching it again.
• Desperate Housewives
  I was reluctant to this at first, and I guess it took me a good year after it started airing before I finally ventured into the world of these housewives. And I’m so glad I finally did. This is one of those shows that never disappoints a single episode, and every season keeps getting better than the last. Season 3 is currently airing and I check it out every single week.
• Veronica Mars
  Fuck I love this show, like Desperate Housewives, it also just gets better and better every season. Though I wouldn’t classify it as the best show on earth, it’s still one of my alltime favorites, I really enjoy myself when I’m watching this.
• Lost
  Like everybody else, I got totally into this the first season. The second season sort of made me lose interest a bit, but I still kept watching out of curiosity and to try and get some sort of closure to the story. Of course that didn’t happen. The third season has so far pissed me off thoroughly, and as of the fourth or fifth episode I just stopped watching it, and I doubt I’ll bother picking this up again. Lost, you lost me I’m afraid.
• Prison Break
  I loved this from the start, and I’m still watching the second season. I liked the first season better though.
• Mythbusters
  This is one of those rare shows where I fell in love within the first five minutes of the first episode, and I’ve been watching it ever since. I hope it’ll keep airing for a long time.

And last, the current animes I’m watching:

• Akagi
• Mushishi
• Death Note
• Fist of the North Star
• One Piece

After hearing so much about Battlestar Galactica for years now, I decided I’d finally go check it out, though I’m fairly skeptic about it. So I downloaded the mini series that started it all, and I’m just about to go watch it.

I’m unsure what the verdict will be, specially considering my previous encounters:

• Star Trek: TNG, THE series above all.
• Firefly, utter crap.
• Babylon 5, meh…
• Red Dwarf, ownage.
• Star Trek: DS9, no thanks.
• Star Trek: Voyager, no words needed.

It’s been… Oh… 54 hours since I started watching the first episode of House. I’m now up to episode number 34. That’s about 23 hours worth of viewing. Needless to say, I’ve gotten somewhat addicted. It’s quickly grown to be one of my favorite series, perhaps only surpassed by Rescue Me. So thanks to Angstypants for introducing me to House <3.

Christmas is slowly commencing, I’m not sure why, but this year it feels much better than the last previous years. There still hasn’t been much snow yet, and still I’ve started to get a little Christmas feeling anyway. I just love winter, it is by far the best season of the year in my opinion, I can’t wait for some proper snowfall to make it all complete. There’s nothing like cuddling up underneath a blanket when it gets really cold, drinking hot black currant toddy, eating mandarins/nectarines and watching old Disney cartoons.

The feeling really hit me today watching SVT1, one of the Swedish TV channels, where they were showing “Disneydags”, a one hour program with Disney cartoons. They used to show this way back in the days as well, I remember watching it a lot before. For some reason, I prefer those old cartoons in the Swedish language, I think it stems from the times when the cartoons on TV3 were only broadcasted in Swedish here, and not dubbed in Norwegian like they are today. They used to have something similiar as “Disneydags” on TV3 as well, I don’t remember what exactly it was, but at least they showed Duck Tales episodes. If I ever watch Duck Tales and the likes nowadays, it just sounds completely wrong if it isn’t it Swedish.

Other than that, last week I finally got my ass down and applied for welfare. Still haven’t received any, or gotten any idea of how much it will consist of.