No more blogging from me for a while. I’m tired of writing stuff and having to defend my opinion as if I was some crazy lunatic. Also, I’m getting annoyingly close to the point where I start writing for my “readers” (yeah, all five of you) instead of for myself, and that’s not good.

So, no more blog for a while.

UPDATE: Sometimes I’m very rash and impulsive. I wrote that it was the negative comments that are forcing me to take time off. This is a bit of an over-simplification. I honestly don’t care much about any negative comments posted. Sure, I get annoyed at them for mostly missing my point, but in the long run they are water under the bridge. The real reason for me to take some time off is simple: I have very little energy and inspiration to write. There’s too many things going on in meatspace, and I’m too stressed out about various issues to find the peace and motivation required to write somewhat decent postings. I’m going to take some time off, completely ignore the blog, completely ignore my feedreader and just relax.

Plus, my frickin’ keyboard is dying. Anyone care to sponsor me with a new Logitech Wave?

… but I don’t really know about what. A lot of things I need/want to write about are pretty local in tone, at least as far as the global community goes. Most of it is Sweden-related.

For example, I’m still completely aghast that the minister of justice here in this country apparently thinks bribery and corruption is an acceptable and completely tolerable policy. At least if the briber is wealthy enough to pay off real big.

The story behind this is the same one that has been causing reality to distort for quite a while now. The police officer Jim Keyser, who got a well-paid job at the global mediamaffia, caused some stir a few weeks (months?) back. Beatrice Ask, the swedish minister of Justice, basically said that she approved of it, and said it was nice that the “competence” among swedish police-officers is at a level that it allows them to use it for their own personal gain. This is the same minister who wants to allow the mediamaffia to completely undhindered pursue filesharers and also wants to introduce complete data-retention in order to spy on her own voters.

Completely crazy. The only real conclusion I can draw from her insane statements is that she’s as corrupted as everyone else involved in this ludicrous pursuit.

Another thing that is causing frustration in my head is religion. I’ve been meaning to write something about why I find religion so crazy and backwards. The trick though is to manage to do it with a somewhat maintained level of grammatical and vocabular style. As it stands, my thoughts on religion are usually peppered with some very rude curses. I really don’t give two hoots if I offend some bibletoting fundamentalist wackjob out there, but I don’t want to stoop to their level either.

And finally, I’m still working on my pro-FOSS posting. It’s been on ice for a while, but I might thaw it out tonight and have another go at writing about FOSS, why I like it, why I want to promote it, why I think more people need to leave proprietary software behind and the direct as well as long-time advantages it will have for every human on this planet!

Yes, I can be quite pompous. Whatever.

Yeah, I’ve never really liked MSN, but today I finally felt I had enough. 9 out of 10 messages that I try to send never get sent due to “timeouts” or some other cockamamie bullshit Microsoft cooks up.

So, basically, MSN (or Windows Live Messenger or whatever the hell Microsoft has rebranded it as today) is dead to me. I never liked it, I only used it for those people who I consider friends and who insisted on using this braindead protocol for communication. I don’t really care if it’s that I use a third-party client or not, as far as I’m concerned that shouldn’t be an issue and if Microsoft are (once again) trying to abuse their property to lock users in, then I’m not having any of that.

So, if you contact me and get no reply: it’s not me. It’s Microsofts mess of an IM-protocol. Get me on ICQ or give me an old-fashioned phonecall. Either is preferable.

In the future I’m going to merge all my IM to Jabber, but that’ll be a while

When I grew up the term “game console” was virtually unknown. I grew up when the NES was king, and back then those machines were simply called video-games. The were primitive, clunky, rather expensive and I wanted one badly. Unfortunately for me, there were no video-games in our house.

Since then I have obviously grown up. I was ten years old in 1988, and for the last twenty years I have become less and less interested in game consoles, while the consoles have grown more and more powerful. In fact, I’d say that the consoles of today resemble full-fledged computers more than those primitive ancestors of yore.

And now is why I’m going to wonder why us who prefer PC-gaming has to wait in favor of the consoles.

See, the original Xbox when it arrived back in 2001 was essentially just a PC in a more manageable case. It had a harddrive, it had essentially the same kind of CPU as in most budget-computers, it had a graphics circuit which was essentially a GeForce3, and it had a network card. The new 360 and PS3 are even more powerful, and are essentially computers in a neat package.

Today it’s unheard of to release a game for consoles exclusively, since the PC gaming market is as huge as it’s ever been. Yet we have to wait for games, for seemingly no other reason than an artificially introduced one.

I’ve been looking forward to GTA4 since I first heard it announced. But it seems I’m going to have to wait until October simply because I don’t own a 360 or a PS3. Why? It doesn’t make sense to me. It can’t be THAT difficult to port a game to the PC, especially since they managed to release two versions of it for two different platforms at the same time. The 360 and the PS3 are (I imagine) as different from each other as they are to a PC, yet no PC version is forthcoming until fall. When GTA: San Andreas was released it was the same thing. In that case it was even worse; the PS2 version came almost a full year before the PC version. Why?

Mass Effect is another example. For the 360 it was released in November 2007, yet it has taken six months to make a version for the PC. That version will be released the 28th of this month.

I strongly doubt that there’s a technical reason for not releasing games for the PC at the same time as the consoles. So why do companies do it? Do they just do it out of spite? Or is it that they have to put tons of (in my opinion) useless DRM/Copy protection schemes into the game, and this is what takes six months or more?

But to me as it stands right now, it doesn’t make sense.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Action/Delusion/Complete lack of grounding in reality/Adventure starring among others Nicolas Cage, Jon Voight, Helen Mirren and others.

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Benjamin Gates is back. This time he’s knee-deep in a convoluted plot to clear the name of his ancestor Thomas Gates, and apparently this is done by finding a lost city of gold.

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I kinda liked the first National Treasure. It was somewhat fresh and somewhat exciting. There was no big surprise that there’d be a sequel since it was –as far as I know– a huge financial hit. That’s the way Hollywood works, go where the money is.

So, this is the sequel. Apparently it’s going to be turned into a franchise as well, as is very obviously hinted at through the film.

How to summarize this? Nicolas Cage drones through a confusing and special effects-heavy plot dealing with everything from the Queen of Englands desk to Abraham Lincoln and the statue of Liberty. There isn’t a single stone unturned, for a moment I was expecting Thor, the god of thunder, to make an appearance and help Nic Cage out in his quest for justice and money.

If you liked the first one, you’ll probably get a kick out of this one too. I however think it’s vastly inferior to the spunky tempo of the first one. The plot is littered with really surreal Deus Ex Machinas, subplots run into the sand, the plucky blonde that accompanied them in the first film has in this one been reduced to pretty window-dressing since her only function is to look surprised or hand Cage a keypass every now and then. Riley the computer-geek and general nice guy does the same, basically just performing magic on command. He also got saddled with providing the comic relief for the entire film, and this makes him barely less annoying than anyone else.

To watch this movie you need to heavily suspend your knowledge of how anything works. The laws of physics gets thrown out the window immediately –apparently you CAN crash a car so badly it looks like junk afterwards without wearing seatbelts and yet not getting smashed into a million tiny bits of meat and broken bones. Also, even though the movie is littered with Apple-products none of them actually seem to function like an Apple-product. Every laptop is running the magic Hollywood-OS that chirps and beeps when scrolling text, and hacks into the british department of motor-vehicles at the push of a button. And OF COURSE all the traffic cameras in the UK are tied into the internet, so you immediately can download a photo of your grinning self running a red light. French cops will apparently happily help in translating clues taken from a statue. And a golden city buried underground hasn’t been discovered for hundreds of years, despite the fact that a national monument is built on top of it and every year hundreds of thousands of people stomp the area. And the president of the USA keeps a tiny book in the library of congress, and this book contains every secret and conspiracy theory ever produced. Aaaaand, primitive machinery built hundreds of years ago will work perfectly despite being soaked in water, oil and various other liquids without any maintenance.

This movie tries hard to be a mix between Indiana Jones and Jason Bourne. The first one was fun, this one is a lot more flat and tries too hard to mix too many things into the what-have-you. Top it all off with Nicolas Cages droning voice and expensive hairpiece and you’ve got National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

The only really fun and dynamic scene in the film is when Nicolas Cage slides down a banister and then starts howling absurdities at a security guard.

Other than that, don’t watch this movie if you’re going to pay for it. It’s just not worth it.