This is just a short post to congratulate my old friend Magnus Lindholm who the other day became a father! He and Elsa managed to produce offspring, a small girl who was born the 29th of January. Happy tidings to that little family from all of us here in Umeå!

Fairly surprising the Pirate Bay founders/owners were today charged in Swedish courts. I’ve read the articles and the whole thing is just nonsense in my opinion.

First we have Henrik Pontén who does his absolute best at spreading FUD in every direction possible. He claims to have read the mail-traffic from within The Pirate Bay and says that their primary goal is to make money off of copyright-infringement. Sure, I agree that TPB probably generates a lot of money - but I doubt that money goes to anything other than servers and bandwidth. It ain’t cheap running servers, and TPB eats a lot of bandwidth which ironically costs a lot of money. This doesn’t deter mr Pontén though, and he keeps yapping about the scene. He still refuses to realize that -like I mentioned in my previous posting- the scene is a hydra. No matter how many heads you cut off, new ones will replace the old heads.

I’m always fascinated by how politicians and lobbyists never understand the things they try to strangle. So many politicians think the Internet is like the phone-company: one centrally controlled being. The internet couldn’t be farther from the truth. The same goes for the scene - Pontén seems to really believe that it can be squashed. He also acts as if it’s something new. Mr Pontén, let me tell you something: I’m just an amateur here, but even I know that the scene is almost as old as I am. It predates general consumer internet-access, and has been going just fine since the early 80’s at the very least. You’re not the first person to believe that he can silence that, and you won’t be the last to fail either.

This whole process is of dubious ethics in my opinion. I read somewhere that the case-file of “evidence” against TPB consists of more than four-thousand pages of legal gibberish. Normally most legal documents detailing an entire case seldom exceeds five-hundred pages. Many people speculate that this is in order to overwhelm the pirates with nonsense, and instead of doing a fair and balanced investigation simply drowning them in legal jargon.

No, this is a complete railroad-job against TPB. It was ordered by powerful mediamafia-interests, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people high up in Swedish government and the legal-system has been corrupted by greed.

More links: Here, here, here and here.

UPDATE: Swedish IDG has a bunch of articles related to this travesty. Read them, but keep in mind that IDG probably has veiled interest in seeing the mediamafia win this one.

I’ve been kicking this around all day. To write about this idiocy or to just ignore it? On one hand, it’s a subject that touches on my own opinions. On the other hand, pretty much everyone who’s talking about it in the old media, (i.e. newspapers) have completely lost any sense of reality. I’d be very surprised to find enough IQ to fill a tablespoon between the whole lot of them. This in turn means that I have to argue against endless stupidity, and as everyone knows, “never argue with idiots, they bring you down to their level and beat you through experience”.

But, I’m going to argue with idiots now. I feel obliged to tune in and add my voice to fray. I’m not going to be quiet today. I cannot be quiet about this any more.

First off we have Liza Marklund. I’ve hardly ever been bothered by this woman who in so many ways remind me of a swedish version of Ann Coulter, at least as far as physical appearances go. Mrs Marklund is a swedish author of fairly generic detective-novels, and this has brought her fame and fortune. I’ve only browsed through her books, but I would say that she values herself a lot higher than I think is reasonable. I’ve noticed that she’s very good at talking about herself and her “craft” or whatever the hell you want to call it. Ann Coulter however is in my opinion the spawn of some ancient evil, and I wouldn’t be the least surprised if you’d need seven tongues to pronounce her real name.

Up until just recently I’ve been very neutral in my opinion about mrs Marklund. She can write her books and go about her business, that’s basically the opinion I’ve had. At least that was until she opened that vat of stupidity that functions as her mouth, and started sprouting all kind of retarded opinions about filesharing and technology. She’s written an opinion-piece that was published in one of the major rags here in Sweden, and it reeks of stupidity. She builds a whole bunch of straw-man arguments, purposefully or maybe by accident confuses various technologies, and makes strong statements about various things she doesn’t have the slightest clue about.

In my opinion she simply writes herself off as being yet another person who stubbornly refuses to accept the reality of things, since it’s more profitable for her. She argues that filesharers are lazy thieves, and that everyone should pay money for culture. The piece she wrote is absolutely awful, and when reading it feels like something written by an angry and spoiled child.

Pathetic.

UPDATE: I completely forgot to write that mrs Marklund apparently considers libraries to also be thieves by extension of what she argues about. I tried very hard to find some kind of coherent argument in her rantings, and the only thing that she seem to stick by is that tired concept of Intellectual Property. Thus, she considers books, music and movies to be exactly that - non-existent property, owned ideas. Etc etc. Which would by extension mean that library-visitors who borrow a book is also thieves, since they’ve managed to get access to the intellectual property for free. They have gained access to the idea and even though they returned the idea (the book) they still have the memory of the idea and thus have “stolen” it. Mrs Marklund apparently has the same concept of this as the people who wanted to outlaw radio in the 1920’s since they considered radio a threat to those who sold sheet-music…

We also have Antipiratbyråns latest propaganda-piece. Antipiratbyrån is the swedish lobbying-arm for the global mediamafia. In this “article” they expunge a lot of things with very little verification. They claim to have seized some kind of server located at some kind of company. They never mention what company, what server, how they found it or even what purpose it served. For all we know they just pulled the whole “action” out of their asses, and cooked up some story to make themselves seem more successful than they are.

They claim to have dealt a severe blow to the scene, even though they don’t actually seem to know anything about how the scene operates. The article is heavily angled, and the author of it is known to sympathize and write pieces on demand for the lobby-groups.

For example, the article makes heavy use of the raid against Bahnhof a while ago. This was an incident where Antipiratbyrån together with Swedish police raided Bahnhof (a swedish very respected internet supplier) and found a large server containing pirated software, music and films. The article mentions this and claims that Bahnhof lost a lot of respect and customers from this, and generally implies that many firms are actively involved in “the scene” since they have access to hardware and fat internet connections.

What the article conveniently neglects to mention is that the server seized at Bahnhof was funded by Antipiratbyrån in order to provoke a crime! This is called entrapment and is illegal. Antipiratbyrån used an individual who was in dire financial needs and paid him off to start up the server, funded the hardware and knew exactly where it was and how it worked. This makes the whole thing even more absurd. It would be as if cops started selling drugs to people and then immediately afterwards arrested them for possession.

The article also makes some bizarre statement about how pirates generate large amounts of revenue by selling their merchandise to chinese bootleg-companies. These companies pay for pirated DVD-images that they then press on discs and sell. Pardon my french, but why in the blue fuck would this happen? Why would these chinese companies be willing to pay for something that they can just download for free from the net? It makes no sense whatsoever. This just sounds like fabricated justification in an attempt to try to gain support for themselves.

Additionally, I’m always somewhat amused when I read these things about the scene. Antipiratbyrån and RIAA/MPAA have entered themselves into a war that they cannot win. Not only are they fighting against their own potential customers, they’re also essentially fighting against a hydra when they decided to go for fighting the scene as well as their own customers. They can add the war on piracy to other laughably stupid campaigns such as the war on terror and the war on drugs. These three things are essentially like trying to have a swordfight against smoke - there’s no way you can win. They can pat themselves on the back for shutting down one release-group, but I can guarantee them that for every group they manage to “shut down” at least three or more new groups will take their place. For every head they cut off, two new ones grow out instead.

Also in the newspapers is mention of Håkan Roswall who is confident that after 14 months of investigation he now has enough proof to pursue a case against the Pirate Bay. This also makes me shake my head in amazement. What kind of evidence does he have? I don’t know how he managed to finagle some proof, but it’s about as watertight as a screendoor in my opinion. The Pirate Bay is an indexer and tracker - they don’t host any material on their own servers. If Håkan insists on trying to pursue this course of action then the next target should be Google. Google and The Pirate Bay are essentially the same thing - search engines.

UPDATE 080129: Reuters has an english-language article about this travesty here.

I’m a big fan of PvP Online. It’s a hilarious comic that I’ve been following for a good many number of years now. Sure, it has it’s ups and downs and it has changed a lot over the years, but none the less I still follow it. It’s a bit edgier than the stale syndicated strips in newspapers, and it’s a bit nerdier than them as well. It’s part of my daily routine, and I never miss an update.

When Scott announced about a year ago that an animated series called “PvP: The Series” would be produced I thought that Oh, boy I just have to see this! Scott had previously done some half-assed homemade flash-animation that was slightly amusing but not really much more than an experiment, really. So, a professionally produced animated series with proper voice-acting, distributed via subscription-model over the internet sounded like a fun thing. I wanted to show my support for such a project so I signed up, since Scott had announced that the number of pre-signups would make it or break it.

That was a year ago.

After having experienced the twelve monthly alloted episodes I can safely say that it was worth my twenty bucks, but that I will not renew my subscription. Sure, it was twelve amusing episodes. I admit as well that I might come off as slightly greedy by saying this, but I never really felt that I got my moneys worth. I think that Scotts work just lends itself better to a traditional daily comic rather than a two-three minutes animated episode.

The animation was nice, and I was impressed by how the animators managed to emulate the style of Scotts drawings. And while the episodes really were just animated versions of the daily strips I still felt kinda short-changed. I’m not going to go off on some screaming rant saying “OMG THIS SUCKED SO BAD DO NOT SPEND MONEY ON IT!” because that wouldn’t be true. This is purely my personal opinion and not some kind of review. I liked the attempt, but it just didn’t click for me.

Not much to report today. I’m keeping my emotions in a tight reign. Today, I don’t want to break down. Today I want to feel good. The worries of the future will have to wait for just a while.

I went to a meeting with Arbetsförmedlingen (the swedish government employment agency) to discuss some of my future. I like my handler there, he’s an amiable fellow who is light on the bureaucracy and heavy on the empathy. Nice for a change. He’d been in contact with Rolf where I work-tried back in August. Even though Rolf and his supervisor were positive to having me back they were overloaded with work and felt that it was better to say no right now, but keep options open. I’m guessing the heavy workload is from them starting up the second server-room, and that’s probably consuming all the personnel they have.

None the less, my handler was positive and we’ve got a meeting set for mid-february to follow up on some things.

After that I picked up the birth control pills for my cat, and picked up my watch that had come back from repairs. Ann-Sofie gave me this really nice watch for christmas/birthday, unfortunately I quickly discovered that after a few hours it started lagging behind. Thus it was sent off for repairs. Or, rather not, since I just got a new identical watch instead. I guess the clockwork was fubar’ed, or something.

The weather today was horrible. Just around freezing, very windy and snow was falling from the sky as if it was the end of the world. The bus downtown got stuck once, and once slid backwards and hit some Toyota. Just a light touch, since the Toyota didn’t bother staying. None the less, it was slow going and the bus was almost 20 minutes behind schedule, which in turn made me late for that meeting I mentioned up there.

Here’s a photo I took with my phone while waiting for the bus this morning. Almost whiteout conditions. Of course the crappy phone-camera did an excellent job of not showing the snowfall and white conditions.

I just found out that Heath Ledger died yesterday. My first reaction was that it was a bad joke, but after reading Wikipedia it turned out to be true.

This has somewhat shaken me. Ever since I first saw him in 10 Things I Hate About You I knew that this was a talented guy to keep an eye on in the future. It turned out I was right, he’s done some pretty impressive movies.

And all of a sudden he drops dead.

Today is a painful day. But I’ve come to two realizations that I need to work on in order to stay sane and maintain my life. Actually I’ve known these before, but I’ve ignored them because I thought I was larger than they were.

I need to be more transparent and more honest. I have a tendency of bottling things up inside of me, and this fills me with even more pain in the long run. In the short run I feel better, I’m keeping up appearances but at the cost of my own harmony. It’s better if I’m more honest and more transparent. It’s a kind of self-therapy I guess.

Me and Ann-Sofie are trying to find solutions. But in the meantime, I need to be more honest and more transparent. I have too much of a tendency to close the gates, and this hurts not only myself but people around me. Shutting people out is not the solution.

This has reflected on my blog. Rather than writing about the real me, I write about shallow stuff that’s easy to digest as well as produce. But I need to start using my blog to open up. Expect more personal opinions and thoughts in the future.

I suffer from depression. Clinical depression. The bad stuff. The really, really bad stuff. For the last seven years I’ve fought a battle against something inside me that’s broken. Because that’s how I feel about being depressed - I feel as if something inside me is broken. Something isn’t right. Some cog or wheel or gear is slipping around the machinery, and I feel broken. I don’t know what’s broken, much less how to fix it.

I’ve learned to live with it. It’s like being in limbo. Many times I feel so shitty that I want to die. In fact, that’s what I feel like right now. I don’t want to continue living. But at the same time I don’t want to die either. I like being alive, most of the time, though it’s just very painful for me, and like most depressed people I think of death as an easy way out.

But suicide is cheating. I’ve always felt that, even when I’ve come close to ending my life. Those times were times of extreme desperation. I didn’t like the options, but the thought of eternal silence and a permanent end to the pain inside me was so tempting that I at least tried it. It were of course cries for help, just like this posting is a kind of cry for help.

Depression is walking hell. It’s a life of being so broken that you can’t explain the pain to anyone, not even you yourself can see how it works or even why you suffer from it. There’s a line in some song I heard once that goes something to the effect of “when I die I’ll know I’ll go to heaven, because my life is hell”. That’s a very accurate description of how I feel most of the time.

I think that the worst part of depression isn’t the immense pain I feel inside my soul. No, the worst part I think is that it’s impossible to describe. No matter how hard I try it’s impossible for words to even come close to describing the confusion, the frustration, the pain and sorrow that burrows inside me. No matter how I try the words will never make justice to this hell. I’m not good at talking about it either, and that’s why I choose to do it like this - words on a website for both friends, relatives and complete strangers to read. Some part of me has hope that maybe this will help someone else who also feels as broken and dysfunctional as I do.

Seven years since I first discovered that I was flawed. Seven years filled with various degrees of medication, therapy and a struggle to maintain some hope for the future. Seven years of wandering the wastelands of my soul while at the same time trying to maintain something resembling a life. Trying to pull my part of society, trying to feel anything except deep hopelessness and futility. Seven years of trying to see the good things in a world that for each day more and more resembles insanity.

Three years ago I found Ann-Sofie. I fell in love with her quickly. At first I didn’t want to fall in love, it opens up vulnerabilities and all the times I fell in love before it inevitably lead to enormous amounts of pain and confusion. But I couldn’t control my emotions, I felt as if she was my soulmate. And in some ways I think she is. Just like me she’s broken, and we were both alone in a world. We both had big hearts and we just wanted to find someone to give it to.

I will always love her, even though it’s now come to the grim conclusion that I’ve feared from the start.

And now I need to move on with my life. This is proving very difficult now, because more than ever I don’t want to move on. Once again my head fills with thoughts of the great sleep. The never-ending sleep. The dirt-nap. But I don’t want to do it. I want to live, even though it’s a crippled life which brings me a lot of pain most of the time. Because that’s another of the really painful bits of suffering from this depression. No matter how much you try, it’s difficult to not hurt. Just by existing you hurt yourself, and others around you. This echoes back on you, and you feel even more pain because you know that other people hurt around you, and even though you only try to live your life you hurt others, and this hurts you back. It hurts me because I don’t want to hurt people, but somehow people do get hurt by me.

I’m at the crossroads. Once again I’m standing at the crossroads, and once again I don’t want to move on. It hurts so much. If there was a devil to sell my soul to I would do that instantly. I would ask him to take away this pain inside of me, and let me do the opposite to that line of whatever song it was. I would live my life in heaven and then spend eternity in hell.

But there is no devil. There is no afterlife. There is only this life, and I’m trying to make something decent and worthwhile of it. I know I have every possibility, but I lack the courage, the confidence and the energy to do just that. I know I have talents, but I have no confidence in who I am. That’s one of the many ways in which I’m broken.

I just don’t want to be me.

This is a very minor (and major at the same time) gripe, but I don’t understand why society still is so deeply unequal and unfair.

SvD (a major newspaper here in Sweden) reports that our former minister of justice Thomas Bodström has been threatened. Thomas Bodström is actually a lawyer currently working with a case where one of Swedens most famous opera-singers has been accused of raping someone. I really don’t give a shit about the details of that case, since it has quickly become a media-circus of almost OJ Simpson-esque proportions.

Thomas Bodström is probably one of my least favorite politicians in this country, and strong in the running for one of my least favorite politicians in the world of all time. There’s probably a lot of jackasses out there who thinks he’s the awesome, but in my opinion he’s essentially a sociopath moron who somehow got into power.

But, I digress.

No, my gripe is that no matter how vague a threat all stops are pulled out to protect him. Because he’s famous, he’s a celebrity, he’s a politician. The police is very mum about what kind of threat, but confirms that one such does exist. They’ve added heavy security to make sure he’s not harmed. We don’t know what kind of threat it is, it might be Al Qaida or it might be some drunk yahoo with a disposable cellphone thinking he’s performing the ultimate practical joke.

None the less, all stops are pulled out to protect him.

If I called the police and told them that I’d been threatened with bodily harm or even death they would simply tell me to call back WHEN this purported assailant showed up. They wouldn’t post cops outside my apartment door to make sure I didn’t get shot when I went outside to check my mail or take out the garbage. Because I’m a nobody. I’m not famous, I’m not a celebrity, I’m not rich. I’m expendable.

Shouldn’t a decent society provide equal protection for everyone regardless of social standing? I think so. But then again, there’s a lot of things wrong with our world today. Hundreds of thousands of people lack clean water in Africa, for example.

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