Things I’ve read and liked the last week or so.

  • The Mire (Becky Cloonan)
  • Scalped Vol. 1: Indian Country (Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera)
  • Svavelvinter & Slaktare Små (Erik Granström)
  • Unknown Soldier Vol. 1: Haunted House (Joshua Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli)

And then I’m rereading Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol too. Lots of comics.

Top ten good remakes (not based on short films or plays)

1. The Fly (Cronenberg)
2. Zatoichi (Kitano)
3. Evil Dead 2 (Raimi, I claim it’s a remake of the first one. So there.)
4. The Muppet Christmas Carol (Henson)
5. The Thing (Carpenter)
6. Nosferatu (Herzog)
7. True Grit (Coen)
8. The Maltese Falcon (Huston)
9. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman)
10. Willard (Morgan)

Languages I’d like to learn

  • Irish. Got a fair grasp of the grammar, it’s just the vocabulary that halters. A lot.
  • French. Because I want to be able to read Valérian et Laureline and there are a lot of sites out there by illustrators that write in French. I understand very little French, this is a problem.
  • Icelandic. Listen to the band Mammút, it’s a beautiful language.

Pack list for Swecon since I have to go up real early to catch the train.

  • A book. (Molly Young’s Troubleshooting.)
  • Another book. (Either Jane Yolen or Tove Jansson. Not sure yet.)
  • Doctor Who bookmarks that make no-one happy by just laying here. (The plan is to sell and use the money for beer.)
  • Pens.
  • Notebook for drawings.
  • Brämhult’s orange juice.
  • Mp3-player. Loaded with songs and batteries.
  • A shitload of medicine.

Cookies I get on the way.

Things in my Tumblr Saviour; a list.

Blacklist

  • astrology
  • Ayn Rand
  • Coelho
  • Steve Jobs

Whitelist

  • cookies
  • socks
  • tea

It’s a Thursday! That means a list of doom!

  • The 666th tumblr — there are quite a bit of inactive ones there that I hope will miraculously spring back to life any moment now — I follow was a day or two ago and it’s Nik’s Always Moving .
  • I got a new notebook for drawing things, had to choose a moleskin because they had no real alternatives. But who cares! It’s big and while the Copic markers bleed a tiny tiny bit, it’s much better than much other things I have to draw on.
  • I feel good enough to draw anyway, and to be a bit excited about the notebook.
  • Still don’t want to eat cookies. So there’s a lot of ambivalence.
  • Plans to take over the world has been cancelled.

Awkward things I sometimes mix up.

  • Left and right. I have it easier with left and other left. Go figure.
  • The movies The Fall and The Falls. One is downright odder than most things and the other is about Lee Pace telling a story.
  • Rice noodles and egg noodles. A very silly thing to do.
  • The words polenta and placenta.

Things watched

  • What Remains with Sally Mann
  • The Newsroom pilot (Not documentarian but still.)
  • Hensons Place — The Man Behind The Muppets
  • This Filthy World with John Waters
  • How to Build a Dinosaur with BBC4

Things eaten

  • Grilled meat
  • Grilled salmon
  • Fried chilli cheese
  • Fried mozzarella sticks
  • Non-fried brie
  • Cookies

Check list over things to destroy.

  • The Atlantic Ocean.
  • Unfounded insecurities.
  • All the pineapples.

Right now I dislike the Atlantic more than pineapples.

Had this dream, it wasn’t horrible but a bit unsettling for someone with my issues. So here’s alist with places I’d rather be:

  • New York
  • Uppsala
  • Stockholm
  • Somewhere in Ireland
  • The Canadas
  • Just plain elsewhere

Bonus list with equipped objects in said places:

  • A lantern so not eaten by a Grue.
  • Pen and paper
  • A cookie jar (full)
  • A camera
  • A companion (not an object though so disqualified)
  • Socks.

Albums so far this year that I love

  • Kasey Anderson and the Honkies - Let the Bloody Moon Rise
    Some Depression is the best song of the year.
  • CALLmeKAT - Where The River Turns Black
    Casio.Electro-pop perfection.
  • The Dirt Daubers - Wake Up Sinners!
    Less sarcasm than the Legendary Shackshakers, more bluegrass. Still badass.
  • Frida Hyvönen - To The Soul
    In the genre woman with a pianoi, Frida is the best.
  • Loosegoats - Ideas For To Travel Down Deaths Merry Road
    Good songs, great songs even. For the Love Of hurts like a motherfucker.

I had this thought about posting a list of real tumblr crushes as opposed to the statistical one, then I realised that I can’t do that. Then they’d know! And with knowing comes the possibility of mockery and pointing and laughter and going “ewww”. The curse of being a chickenshit. It would also be quite a boring list for the rest of you.

So! Here’s another kind of Thursday List of Doom. Recent favourite posts!

  1. Alyssa: your songs saved me
  2. Ramon: Does Calvino
  3. Rachel: Bear sleeve
  4. Faith Erin: Resident Evil 4 comic
  5. Rich: Emily Fisher wants to hear from me!
  6. Remiel: Literature as Bloodsport
  7. Mirre and Tomb: With Dinosaurs!
  8. John: She Hulk & Kitty Pryde, Attorneys
  9. Maija: dumb is not cool, fuckers.

I like people who

  1. make me laugh.
  2. blow my mind. (Not literally! I like my mind.)
  3. are creative even when it works against them. (Which lets face it: it happens to all of us because we can’t turn it off.)
  4. are smart and not assholes about it.
  5. give me cookies.
  6. are not afraid to geek out massively.
  7. have opinions and not be assholes about it.
  8. are women in knitwear and play the violin.

Most people I follow here falls into at least one of these. However, there’s a severe lack of number 5 and 8 both here and out there in the fleshy world.

Best written posts of 2011

These are the fifteen posts I wrote this year that I like the best. Only text, I do not have the distance to play favourites with my drawings.
  1. December 20th, a Tuesday
    “Some days I really wonder. What am I doing here? And why do I even try? It’s hard to try and find a place to fit in when there’s these things working against you and most of them are internal. […]” 
  2. November 30th, a Wednesday
    I got way to excited about a typeface. 
  3. October 19th, a Saturday
    Story Time Saturday: Heaven. 
  4. September 12th, a Monday
    “I hear the rain fall and I can smell the way the wind mixes with the tea. It’s a good sound and it’s a good smell. The tea has a tinge of cocoa and it is sadly more apparent in the smell than taste. I refrain from squirting chocolate sauce in it — a cup of tea should never ever be treated as ice cream. Even if, and I say this emphatically, even if they occasionally fall into the same comfort zone.   […] ”
  5. August 30th, a Tuesday
    “Skrivbordslampa. At first glance it’s a perfectly fine word but no, it can be quite problematic. First off, lets break it down as it’s a compound word.   […] ”
  6. August 19th, a Friday
    “I didn’t reach class that day. Instead a car drove out in front of me at a T-cross section. There were a stop sign at her exit and all, but she didn’t see me. My gut instincts woke up from their slumber and pushed the pedal down and steered away. There was no collision because of this. Everything missed with a… I don’t know. It can’t have been much though [..]”
  7. August 6th, a Saturday
    “There was this Black Jack table too, a friend — let’s call him Butch — sat down there and started playing. It went sort of okay I think, memory is a bit fuzzy on that. Next to Butch, his sister — here Sundance — talked to a stranger as one occasionally do in bars. Suddenly Butch leaned over. […]” 
  8. 13th July, a Wednesday
    One of the bullets from a larger list: “A small list of superficial things: (a) moving gracefully. You know, the fluid way people who really know how to dance moves. I myself is a broken down muscle car: not much torque or speed and turns like a beached whale. (b) thick socks and knitted sweaters. Anyone looks good in those things, one of the reasons I love autumn so much. (c) The eyes and nose triangle in the face. Noses are underrated I think.” 
  9. April 24th, a Sunday
    “Posting photos of naked and half-naked people, even gifs, are considered okay but naked self-portraits are frowned upon. Why is that? Makes no sense. It doesn’t even have to be good photos, people go nuts about sleaze from Terry Richardson which to me if far far worse than the self-expressed nakedness. […]” 
  10. April 5th, a Tuesday
    “I don’t think creativity is this mythical beast. This is something that make me despise the drivel that was Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED-talk. It’s all down to hard work and being open to possibilities. (It’s also about finding a medium for oneself but this isn’t about that because that one can be very hard. And yes, I think that being in front of a camera can be as much creative medium as behind it even in still photography.) […]” 
  11. March 30th, a Wednesday
    A discussion with Alexis about the personal web.
  12. March 23dth, a Wednesday
    The Character Sheet Meme.
  13. February 12th, a Saturday
    “Parts of me had hoped that when the tag illustration got curated, it’s radar would shift towards things tumblr users had done themselves. I know. It’s a silly thing because that’s not how things operate. The radar there right now is a bit of a disgrace I think. […]” 
  14. January 8th, a Saturday
    “It’s an odd thing. The way we’ve been hammered in all the possible metaphorical ways to think that the original is better. Even when there’s no real original, there must be a limit. I’m not sure why but I think it has something to do with money and, no, I can’t really come up with another reason. Perhaps to create a manufactured urgency and envy. But those are more side-effects from the money issue. […]” 
  15. January 4th, a Tuesday
    “It’s hard to reach out. Even for just a second, and then it gets even harder when the flesh meet. Will I pull back? Flinch and throw myself into a corner while in panic try to construct walls out of anything nearby? Mostly there’s a flinch, and the brain struggles to maintain control and keep some sort of an appearance up. On a good day, that glimpse of panic beneath the mask is only peripheral. There have been days when a goodbye was said with a handshake and not a hug. […]”

To go through and find the best things you lot has written would kill me since there’s been quite a lot more than fifteen.

snickr replied to your post: These kind of days I hate: When the self-image…

These are the days that I love:
- The first thick socks of the season.
- The meals I remember to eat slowly.
- The smell of the cookies.
- The reassurance that I’ll always get a reply.

The days I love then:

  • When the air and sky are clear and you can see stars both big and small as well as the faint shades of the milky way.
  • When I sleep on a couch or floor at a friend. It’s one of the few times I can go to sleep early.
  • When people just say hi or ask me to be a part of things without me being the initiator. That happens far to seldom.
  • When there’s rain hitting the window late at night.
  • And sometimes, the rare times when I can just let everything go and sit on the floor with a cup of tea and listen to music without any thoughts in the brain ruining it.
  • When the snow is crisp and sparkle with the sun as it goes squeek under the boots. Add great music in the ears, and a slight wind that search itself in between the scarf-intervals and I’ll smile like an idiot.
  • When people actually want to hug me. Those days are awesome.