kthxbai

I realize it's a little confusing with my two blogs. I thought I'd have this one for longer entries and tumblr for micro-blog-entries, but I don't really know where to draw the line and this all have just turned into madness. I prefer dear ol' tumblr, so I think I'm going to stop posting here and just be there - apparently no one was bothered by me posting long posts on my tumblr-blog to begin with, so.. See you there, aight? :)

The crazy things we call epilators

Sometimes I do crazy things - like trying out insanely painful hair removal-tools. What you see in the picture is something we apparently call an "epilator", this one in particular is a Braun Silk-épil 7 dual. Dual, because it doesn't only use 40 tweezers to, in a very painful way, tear up your hair from the roots, it's also equipped with sharp razor blades. Yeah, you do not want to mess with that one.

Another thing that's special about this one is that it can be used under water, which is supposed to make the process less painful. I tried doing both, and I can't really say it made a lot of difference - it still felt as if someone was cutting up my legs with a knife. I'm familiar with this pain since I used to let professionals do my eyebrows, but I'd still pull the epilator away now and then to check that it didn't actually slice my leg up.

I used it without the razor-head since I wanted to try what it's really like to use an epilator, and also since I wanted the work done properly. It took quite some time of course, and when I was done I noticed that in some areas it hadn't successfully pulled the hair up, just cut it off..

It's now been two weeks since I did this I think, and the hair that got successfully removed is growing back. I can tell you that what's more uncomfortable than the removal process is feeling the hair growing under your skin.

Enough whining, it's a painful process and if you've read anything about epilators (not written by the companies selling them) you know this already. The question is just if it does the job good enough to be worth the time, and I'll probably have to give it another chance before I can decide - but I'll definitely do this while watching a good movie or something and not just waste my time in the bathroom trying to minimize the pain by using it under water.

Some reviews also writes that this thing makes a lot of sound. I'd say for a crazy machine working with 40 tweezers - not so much sound.

Bartenders hate you

The Bartender Hates You is trending on my Facebook feed, and.. Yeah well, alright, two people have posted these kind of videos today - but it's two people that don't have any friends in common so it's clearly popular!

Anyway, I feel a little guilty when I watch some of these, since I can become a little douchy when I approach the bar to get a drink or for any other reason need bartenders/waiters attention. You see, at first when I was a newbie I'd just stand slightly leaning over the bar with an innocent smile on my face, trying to look pretty and hope they'd pay a little attention to me - but I soon learned that this doesn't work that often (although surprisingly often considering it's just little ol' me). But one day a few male friends taught me that the trick is to hold a hand out with money visible between the fingertips, like the man in the first video does. As terrible as it may sound, this always does the trick. Sometimes when I meet up with some friends by the bar and they tell me they've been standing there for ages without being noticed, I douche myself up and say; "here, look how the pro's does it", pick up some money and hold it out over the desk. Someone come running and I say, "these people want your attention". That have never gone wrong, it's like magic.

To be honest, I wouldn't understand that this is actually a douchy thing to do if it wasn't for my ability to read people's faces. To me, it's really quite logical and sane. What's reasonable with the fact that you're just standing there waiting for some attention while others come and go when you were there waiting long before them? People these days, I say. But yeah, if you have a more "humane" way of getting your drinks in appropriate order, please inform me of how to do it - because I'm not going to stand around there all night, quiet, honoring morals when I'm not being respectably treated back.

Wow! My real motive was to find out how to do better, instead I defend my ways and bash on innocent bartenders, painted them all up as evil cry-babies! Isn't that how I roll.

Awkward fashion is awkward

Oh boy, this has been one awful day. It included the most boring weather I've seen in a long while, and for once I was awfully tired a big part of the day. They also made depressing announcements about perhaps moving some of my amazing co-workers to a different floor (I hope it's a weak "perhaps"), and a bug flew back into my nest. I'm terrible depressed today - but I guess that kind of days are necessary too so I can fully appreciate my more shiny days.

Thought I could make the day better by doing some cloth shopping over the Internet. I hardly ever do that, because as soon as I even think about buying clothes I get a new load of clothes for free from my best friend or my older sister - and since they only buy pretty clothes from popular brands I settle for that.

Good god, what is this? :(

Anyway, I soon realized what a terrible mistake it was to try doing some shopping on my own. I ended up scrolling through pages and pages of that awful thing we today call "fashion", that is pictures of women looking really serious and depressed, wearing clothes about as shapeless and boring as garbage bags. Ew, you bastards! Good thing my fiancee was brilliant enough to put a new bottle of wine in the fridge, I really need that today.

Wow, blogspot probably has the worst compose-tool or-whatever-we-call-it ever. Yeah, hope your day is better than mine.

The Awful Truth About Keendra Blaze

I'm packing a really dark secret that I've only ever told to those I trust the most. A few chosen someones, of which some took it well - but to some it was something so dark and awful that they just couldn't deal, so bad that they had to break my trust.

I don't want to go on hiding this secret anymore, and I've finally grown enough so that I feel ready to reveal everything to the world - the horrible truth about Keendra Blaze. But first, I want to tell you a little story.

When I was about three, something really magical and amazing suddenly appeared in our home. A part of it looked like a small TV, but no - it wasn't a TV. Another part of it made sounds, mostly it just sounded like a vacuum cleaner on low effect, but sometimes it made funny beepy sounds. The best part of it though, was probably the plate full of buttons you could push, of which some where extra much fun as they tended to cause the funny sound! They called this wonderful thing a "Computer".

Nothing fascinated me as much as this machine. For a while it was my favorite thing to do, to pointlessly keep pushing all these magical buttons. It didn't take long before a couple of men, friends of my father, started coming over and hang out in front of my new found love as well. I loved to hang around them and see what they were doing with it, and quite soon they'd written these notes with instructions on which button I should push in what order to make the computer do amazing things - like starting computer games.

I particularly remember this game I kept playing over and over played in just two colors - in our computers case black and green. You were to chase this thief called Carmen around the world.. As a three-year old I couldn't really read, even less understand English, so there's no way I could actually understand the clues given to me - but to randomly pick an option and aimlessly travel from place to place didn't make it any less entertaining for me. I can also recall often playing a more colorful game where you play as a rocket and jump from platform to platform..

Anyhow. On Christmas Eve my fourth year on this planet - that's when I got my new best friend. Well, I had to share it with my older sister, but that actually worked out great - hell, it was probably the only thing we could actually be friends about. The Nintendo Entertaining System. That night our parents let us stay up longer than usual, and the fun we had playing this Super Mario! So fun we couldn't really sleep, so at four in the morning we snuck up to play some more - but that really wasn't appreciated by our mother with super hearing, who sent us back to bed instantly.

"I've played video games all days from murnen to evnen" (morning to evening), written in my school journal telling my teacher what I did all weekend, 9yrs old.

Whenever my sister and her friends didn't occupy the console I'd play, and when they did, I'd watch. My new best friend stayed with me for about eight great years, making me dizzy every day from all the blowing to make the games function. Super Mario (1, 2, 3), Spy vs. Spy, Solomon's Key, Flintstones, Chip'n'Dale, Duck Tales, Darkwing Duck, Turtles, Lolo, Ghosts and Goblins.. I'd play what I could get my hands on, over and over and over again, but I was quite alone among my surroundings about having this interest.

I'd also play as much as I could on my best friend's computer, her brother and father were somewhat interested so there were some games to be found there - like Commander Keen 1 and 2, and SimTower. They also had this old, cool machine on which you could play some awesome games, including Gina Sisters. Yes, Commodore 64.

We've always been special.

When I was around 12 years old my parents bought a new computer, which of course I occupied most of the time. When it arrived it didn't get very far, it got hooked up on the floor in the hallway, then I'd be lying there in font of it for quite some time. My father's friend made the horrible mistake of teaching me how to connect to the Internet, then my sister wasn't the only one causing huge phone bills. Game wise I'd still play anything I could get my hands on, but still being a loner-gamer in a gods-forsaken town it wasn't much to brag about. There were a lot of Commander Keen (all) and Jack Rabbit 2, Pandemonium, SimCity (though I'd played an older version of it at a friends house before), SimTower, GTA, The Sims, Claw, and shit like that.

The real diamonds were to be found on friends' computers which had game-interested brothers or fathers. Especially one friend's father had interesting games, but she never wanted to hang out with people - the TV was her thing. I found her honesty quite impressive - she'd say straight out that she didn't want to hang out with people because she wanted to watch TV, while I'd usually fake different illnesses to get out of such.. But she had something I wanted, so sometimes I'd successfully convince her to let me hang out there, promising I wouldn't get in the way of her TV-watching and stick to the computer. Win-win? Sick-sick? :D Well, it gave me the opportunity to play these two very mind-blowing games; Wolfenstein 3D and WarCraft II. God, I loved it.

Those were the days. I'd do anything to play obviously - I've already told you about lies and manipulation. I was quite sneaky in other ways too, during the summers when my mom forbid me to be inside (it's a family joke now days, my older sister would get grounded and therefor forbidden to go outside, I'd get the opposite punishment) so I'd play outside like normal kids, I'd sneak up on the garage roof and crawl in through the window and keep playing.. It was at this age, the age of 12, that I decided I wanted to be a game programmer and I did have a really good idea about what that meant.

For the rest of middle school that was what I feasted on, but then, when I went to high school I found people with common interests to hang out with. I'd also managed to save up some money, and my parents were done with their studies and shit and had now fatter wallets, so I also bought/got my own very first computer to play with. That's when LAN:ing entered my world and a door opened to finding more amazing games to play. Dungeon Siege 2, Baldurs Gate 2, NeverWinter Nights, Diablo 2, WarCraft 3 TD, Quake, CS, Dungeon Master, Battlefield 1942, Postal 2.. Playing over the network, I loved it. I'd been dreaming of doing so since I first knew it was possible, when I was 10 and a boy played the card game Hearts with me from another computer in school. I mean, later on I'd bought a little LAN-kit and hooked the computers together at home and played small network games I could find with my little sister, but this was so different, mind blowing..

Anyhow, I've already been going on a little too much about all this. Now to the terrible, terrible secret. As you may or may not have noticed, I didn't mention any of the apparently oh so legendary Zelda, or Final Fantasy games for that matter. Why, you wonder? Well, simply because I never played them. When I tell people this they usually look at me with a really disappointed and surprised look and mock me with "you are not a real gamer". For a while, when I was young and more vulnerable, this actually got to me - but for some reason I kept not playing them to undo this terrible crime. Today I'm actually proud that I didn't! Proud, because if I had it would've only been to please you, and I would've spent that time working to regain the respect from people who I realize now wouldn't have deserved the effort. Sure, Zelda and Final Fantasy might be so incredible that I owe the gaming community to play it, but the games I did play, which you might not have, hold some great value too and you don't see me judging you for not having played them.

Furthermore, people are really concerned in general by the fact that I haven't played this and that game they've played lately, but when I tell them about the wonderful games I've enjoyed lately it doesn't bother them a bit that they've totally missed out on those great experiences. Because I haven't played the games they've played or are looking forward to the games they're looking forward to I shouldn't be considered a "real gamer", and my whole reason for studying game development should be seriously questioned. Well folks, I don't recall ever asking for being called "a real gamer", and I'm honestly not interested in being one if it requires me to fit your silly template for what a real gamer is.

Take my whole Dragon Age-experience for example, as it's the most recent game I've played that have topped my list of favorite games. Some of you haven't even tried the game while I played through Dragon Age 1 and 2 and almost all of the expansions about three or four times each in average. It's a game that's more than just a great story and good gameplay, it has great depth and space for you to really dig into the world and.. Really live and breath it, if you let it. Especially Dragon Age 1. The first time I'd played it through I seriously started crying hysterically in Daniels arms, so sad that Alistair, Leliana and Morrigan were not to be in my life any more - after all this amazing time we'd shared fighting side by side and all those heart-to-heart talks. Gosh, my eyes almost tears up from talking about it. What, you think that's silly? If so, I might want to mock you right back and ask what kinda gamer you are, but since I understand you can experience games differently I wouldn't do something so silly.. ;-)

I guess I'll get Dungeon Siege 3 sometime soon, and I'll definitely play Skyrim when it's out. That's the kind of games I prefer - RPGs. If you ask me to play any other kind of game with you I won't say no (unless I'm lazy or busy), except rts-games to be honest, it's too un-linear for my brain. I'll even enjoy it a lot, though prepare for me not being the best at it. It's just the way it is.

There is however one game that's also come up that I haven't played that I really regret I didn't pay more attention to in the past. Portal. Yes, Sven, I lied - or merely painted over the truth, but it's still a lie and I'm truly sorry. No, I haven't played them. I tried undo this mistake recently, but Portal 1 kept crashing on the computer. As for Portal 2, I haven't given myself the time to continue where I left off, but yes I know I'll love it and I will continue sometime when my mind is not overflown.

Yeah, I'm not even going to bother answering what on earth I was doing studying game programming, because if you haven't figured it out after reading all of this you're just not going to get it. The only thing important is that I know that I've made the right decisions for me, I know that you and I are not the same kind of gamer, I know that you know things I don't know and vice versa, and I know I'm different and I'm happy about that - that makes my point of view and my experiences so much more treasured and meaningful to me.