Tuesday 24 December 2013

So this is Christmas

Right, another Christmas.

So we boiled the Swedish style Christmas ham, made our own chicken liver paté, kalvsylta with proper big chunks (jellied veal according to the almighty Wikipedia, sounds horrible) today, and we have a few other things in store (sill, our own spiced up snaps and so on). Oh the feast that shall commence tomorrow will be a vivacious sight to behold, ho-ho! And in a few days we will have lutfisk, om-nom-nom (what's the hate all about, it's lovely).

And I couldn't hold it any longer (I haven't even started a game since mid-August or so!): Saturday evening I installed Anachronox and had a go. My goodnees do I love good single-player adventure games sooo much or what. The times when game developers took risks and thought "let's make a fun game!" instead of what they seem to do now which is "let's make a fun game that everybody will want to play!". Any type of media aimed at a broad audience is going to be bland. Maybe people are happy with that. Bland and mediocre. Bill Hicks, please come back :p

So Anachronox, what can I say about it? It's silly, it's funny, it seems to be pretty large, lots of characters, a plot and story that is still lingering and teasing in the shadows, pretty good production overall. Bad things include RPG-style fighting which I'm not a fan of, and the occasional slowdown in certain areas. Deus Ex 1 is a slightly better game, but Anachronox is better than anything that comes out these days anyway, so there.

I'm moving to Germany on the 6th. I wonder if I'll ever find a home. Oh well, a new adventure awaits!

Went to Gothenburg on the Friday the 13th (st Lucia day in Sweden!) to see Francois Englert speak about his work for which he received this year's Nobel prize in physics. Nice man, good talk, I felt like I almost understood what he did.

I wanted to learn some Christmas songs on my guitar, and figured that the tabs online are all rubbish, so I made my own version of Deck the Halls. Pretty nice, I have been thinking about recording it, but I haven't found the peace to do that quite yet. And now it's a bit late, eh?

Aerial perspective on the terrain, yay! Cool, now I have to fix all the graphical bugs.

I received my Ph.D. certificate today, finally. Refrigerated beans, I'll have it copied to be safe. And I've been seriously contemplating a small change of career, I'll work on that when I've moved to Germany.

Woah, this became a jumbled mess. And now it's past midnight, it's the ghost hour, and I'm actually now on Christmas Eve, so here comes the warmest chant of the year:

To everybody, not a single individual excluded:
Happy Christmas! Go' Jul! Frohe Weihnachten! Joyeux Noël! Meri Kurisumasu! (I haven't installed katakana input on my Lenovo yet, sorry.)